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Video Trimmer.

A video trimmer that copies the streams instead of re-encoding them.

→ Open the trimmerFree, no account, and your video is never uploaded

How it works.

Cut the dead air off the start and the end.

  1. Step 1

    Drag your video in

    Or click to choose a file. It stays on your device.

  2. Step 2

    Set the in and out

    Drag the two handles, or press I and O while it plays.

  3. Step 3

    Save the trimmed clip

    One click, and it downloads.

In detail

A trimmer has one job: keep the middle, drop the ends. This one does it by copying the packets between your marks, so there is no encoder involved, no quality lost, and no four-minute wait for a job that should be instant. The strip under the preview carries a filmstrip, the waveform, and the keyframe positions, so you can see the silence you are cutting and where a lossless cut is allowed to begin. Frame-accurate mode is one chip away when the cut has to land on an exact frame, and it says plainly that it re-encodes to do it.

What it gives you.

  • Lossless by default

    The packets between your marks are copied byte for byte. What you download is the same footage, not a re-encoded version of it, and it takes about a second because nothing is decoded on the way.

  • Frame-accurate when you need it

    One chip switches to a mode that re-encodes the video so the cut lands on the exact frame you marked. It costs a generation of quality, it takes longer, and it says both of those things before it runs.

  • The keyframes are on the strip

    Short pencil marks under the ruler show every position a lossless cut is allowed to begin. Where your in point ends up is never a surprise, and the plan line names it in timecode.

  • Any size, nothing uploaded

    A four gigabyte drone file is read off your own disk. No upload, no queue page, no stranger holding your footage while a progress bar lies to you.

  • Keeps the original format

    An MKV comes out an MKV and a WebM comes out a WebM, with the same codecs inside. MOV is the one container that changes, because an iPhone recording belongs in an MP4 that other people can open.

  • No watermark

    Not on a free tier, because there is no other tier. The file that lands in your downloads folder is your file.

Straight answers.

Is there a free video trimmer with no watermark and no upload?

This one. The trim runs in your browser using the same decoders that play video in it, so the file never leaves your machine and there is nothing for a watermark to pay for. There is no account, no queue, and no size ceiling other than your own disk, because the file is read where it already sits rather than copied to a server first.

Why did my start point move slightly earlier than I set it?

Because a lossless cut can only begin on a keyframe. Most frames in a video are stored as the difference from the frames before them, so they are meaningless without those frames; only a keyframe stands on its own. Cameras and screen recorders usually write one every one to three seconds, so your in point moves back by up to that much and keeps a moment of the dead air. Nothing you wanted is lost, which is why the default rounds this direction rather than the other. If the cut has to be on your exact frame, switch to frame-accurate and it will re-encode to get there.

Lossless or frame-accurate: which one?

Lossless, almost always. It is instant, it loses nothing, and half a second of extra head on a clip is not something anyone notices. Choose frame-accurate when the first frame matters: a cut on a beat, a clip that has to start on a specific word, or a trim you are handing to an editor who will match it against something else. That mode decodes and re-encodes the video, which takes real time and costs one generation of quality.

Does trimming a video lose quality?

Not here, in the default mode. The video and audio packets inside your range are copied into a new container without being decoded, so the bytes that describe your picture are identical to the ones in the source. Every tool that re-encodes to trim, which is most of them, loses a little quality every time you use it. Frame-accurate mode is the exception in this tool and it is labelled as one.

Will it open my MOV, MKV, or WebM?

Yes. MP4, MOV, MKV, and WebM are all read directly by the browser, and so are audio files like MP3, M4A, and WAV, which cut precisely because they have no keyframes to worry about. AVI is the exception: the browser cannot parse it at all, so run it through the converter first and trim the MP4 that comes out.

How long does a trim take?

A lossless cut takes about a second, near enough regardless of how long the source is, because the work is reading and writing packets rather than looking at pictures. Frame-accurate mode is a real encode, so budget somewhere around real time for the section you kept: ten seconds of 1080p is a few seconds of work, and a ten-minute stretch is a few minutes.

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