Media players and editing

Table of Contents

Tools for managing metadata

  1. mp3tag (Windows)

Media players

  1. VLC

Tools for editing audio and video in Linux

Avidemux

$ sudo pacman -S avidemux-qt

Cutting videos

  1. Load file
  2. Play it.
  3. Mark point A.
  4. Play it.
  5. Mark point B.
  6. File - Save.

Combining two videos

  1. Load the first file: File -> Open
  2. Append the second file: File -> Append
  3. Export the combined file: File -> Save

Kdenlive

This seems to be increasing the file size though. The cropped clips should have minimal size. They should not be blown up in memory. For this reason, use this with caution.

pacman -S kdenlive

Cropping mp3 and mp4 files:

  1. In the panel, right-click and select “Add clip or folder” and add the file.
  2. Drag the file into the selection window at the bottom.

Cutting a Clip

  1. Using the selection tool, put it at the beginning. Use the menu Timeline ‣ Current Clip ‣ Cut Clip
  2. Using the selection tool, put it at the ending. Use the menu Timeline ‣ Current Clip ‣ Cut Clip
  3. After splitting the original file into parts, delete the parts that are not needed.
  4. Drag the remaining part all the way to the left - to timeline starting at 0.
  5. After setting the beginning and ending points, go to Project -> Render -> Audit Only - Mp3 for audio files or Project -> Render -> Generic - Mp4 for video files.

Splitting files:

  1. Very similar approach to splitting files (delete parts of the file) too.
  2. Use the razor-tool to make the selection, right-click and delete the selection.

VLC

https://www.vlchelp.com/cut-trim-videos-with-vlc-media-player/

mp3directcut

I tried using this but I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

ffmpeg

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/pdctna/ffmpeg_video_compression/

Some packages/frameworks may be available only in RPMFusion repository. So, we may have to add it to Fedora using the following commands :

sudo dnf -y install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf -y install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

After the repository is added, they can be installed using commands like the one below :

sudo dnf -y install ffmpeg

Command to convert m4a to mp3:

ffmpeg -i input.m4a -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k output.mp3

Shrinking video sizes:

None of these reduced the size of the video when I tried them

# General pattern
ffmpeg -i path/to/original/file path/to/new/file

# Example
ffmpeg -i "Desktop/Screen Recording 2022-11-08 at 4.30.40 PM.mov" Desktop/code-walkthrough.mp4

Honestly, I love WebM but it takes waaay too long to encode. I think the best way would be to use h264/h265 along with Opus in a .mkv format. Also, lowering the bitrate of the video/audio helps a ton, along with changing the CRF. Try something like:

ffmpeg -i file.webm -c:v libx264 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k -b:v 5M -crf 23 output.mkv

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mkv

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