Commandline Tools

• Using FFmpeg to Trim Long YouTube Videos Lightning Fast

  I won’t bore you with the details, but after several frustrating sessions of professional video editing, I discovered many of the repetitive tasks a video editor faces can be automated with FFmpeg. I have written a handful of shell scripts which I might share later, but FFmpeg came in clutch once again today for some mindless video processing.

  The Situation

  For the second week in a row, I was emailed a list of YouTube URL’s and timestamps of video clips to pull from these hour-long live stream recordings. My instant reaction to any repeatable pattern in mundane video editing tasks is to crack open the FFmpeg documentation and get to work on a shell script. While FFmpeg could easily handle the video editing task at hand, I also opted to include yt-dlp in this solution, since I had no local copy of the live stream recording and would need to first download that.