Video Cutter & Trimmer

The most common edit is also the simplest: keep this part, drop the rest. A long recording, a screen capture with a slow start, a phone clip with a few seconds of fumbling at the beginning. Doing it should not mean installing an editor. This page cuts a video to the start and end you set and saves the clip as MP4 or WebM, without a watermark, and without the file leaving your computer.

Frame-accurate and re-encoded

Compressed video stores a complete picture only at keyframes, every second or two. Frames in between are stored as changes from the previous ones. A tool that copies the data without decoding can cut only at keyframes, so the clip may start a second early. This tool decodes the video with your browser, steps through each frame in your range, and encodes a new video, so the first and last frames are exactly the ones you chose. The cost is time, and a small loss of quality that follows from encoding again.

Setting the start and end

Drag the Start and End sliders, type seconds in the boxes, or play the preview and press Start at the playhead and End at the playhead. The page keeps the end at least 0.1 seconds after the start and shows the clip length below the controls. The boxes accept values to 0.01 seconds. The preview player is a normal video control, so you can use the keyboard to seek and play.

A worked example

Press Sample to record a three-second 320 × 180 test clip, whose picture changes colour with time and whose timer is drawn on the frame. Set Start to 1 and End to 2 and press Cut the video. The result is an MP4 of 320 × 180 pixels that lasts 1.00 seconds, as the browser test measures from the result player, and the panel compares its size with the original. Play it: the colour at the start is the colour the original had at one second.

Quality, size and format

Below the cut controls are the shared options. MP4 uses H.264 video and AAC sound and plays almost everywhere; WebM uses VP9 and Opus and is smaller for the same quality but plays in fewer places. Size can stay original or be reduced to 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p or 240p. Quality sets the bits per pixel: High, Medium or Small file. The frame rate of the output follows the source, measured when the video loads, up to 60 per second.

Edge cases

A video with no sound track is cut without sound. If you drag the start past the end, the page moves the end. A video recorded in a browser may report no length until it is read to the end; the page handles that by seeking to find it. Very long videos take about as long to process as the frames require, so cut the minimum you can first. Rotation flags from phones are applied by the browser when it draws the frames.

Limits

Only one range is cut at a time. There is no fade, caption, speed change or crop here; the other video tools cover speed, rotation and compression. The result is encoded again, so it is not a byte-for-byte copy, and cutting very short clips of a very high-resolution video can still take a noticeable time. Nothing is uploaded.

Related tools

• Compress Video shrinks the clip further.
• Extract Frames from Video saves stills at the cut points.
• Video Speed Changer speeds or slows the clip.
• Audio Cutter trims sound-only files the same way.