video-compare VS lossless-cut

As mentioned those are different frames you are testing. Personally I use veryslow but most people here don't spend as much time encoding a single item as I do. Also don't use PNGs for checking use Video Compare . You can run two different MKVs at the same time and compare them frame by frame both in playback and pausing them.

use the Video-Compare tool. watch the demo here how it works

https://github.com/pixop/video-compare This one is simple but really good

Well, I would use https://github.com/pixop/video-compare for that - it's the tool I normally use to compare videos (to find differences or to check image compression issues) but it can load the same video twice to watch it frame by frame. It even shows the type of frame I'm on so it's useful when I need to find a keyframe to do a video split with no recoding.

You can preview (export as preview) test of few presets, settings, etc. on TVAI and if you wish you could also use a compare tool to check the results to see for yourself if you notice any difference between them (that would save you tons of time). or just playback the 2s / 5s of the preview(s) you generate, right after the other to see if you spot any difference in quality.

If you need to compare images easily, consider slow.pics. Or ICAT, or Video Comparison Tool. And actually, even x264 and x265 don't have perfect CRF scales as well, they are offset by a constant iirc.

You can easily check the type of each frame with the use of https://github.com/pixop/video-compare/ software - just use the same video twice (as video-compare needs two video inputs) and look for I, B, P letters near the current frame time.

Try Video compare.

For lossless cut, there's the LosslessCut [1] app, which even has an experimental but mostly working version of a "smart cut" feature [2] (aka. only re-encode the minimal mandatory amount of frames if you trim at a point between 2 key frames)

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

[2]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126

> thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution

It's been possible to create a clip from a video file that merely changes what parts of the video are displayed without effecting the data in the original since the Classic Mac OS days.

If you want to completely remove unwanted portions of a video to reduce the size without a loss of quality, there are many options. LosslessCut is one option that is both free and open source.

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

LosslessCut

Lossless Cut is probably the simplest way to cut out parts of a video without having to re-encode it or use an online service. It is open source, free and available for all platforms. It is in essence a frontend for FFMPEG and cuts without re-encoding, so the results are instantaneous.

Additionally I would like if possible to shorten (both to reduce dimension and to make them less boring) my videos by trimming the beginning and/or ends where often there is nothing interesting happening and possibly change the thumbnails for easier identification. Do you know of any tool that does the job with the minimum quality degradation possible? Many years ago I've tried with some videos and a tool I don't remember anymore, ending up with a bunch of corrupted files :( I've found https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut for the point above.. need to try it. please let me know what experience you have with it.

Lossless Cut would probably be a better choice for this. Will let you cut out the commercials without having to re-encode the video.

>Of course, you could only re-encode only the GoPs that get broken while keeping the rest intact, and I guess this would be better and a lot faster than re-encoding everything. I don't know if any application tries to do this.

LosslessCut does have experimental support for this partial re-encode called "smart cut" [1]. Since it's using ffmpeg internally, the challenge become how to instruct ffmpeg to do this[2]?

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126