Looking For A Video Editor that will maintain the codecs of the original source video

Question

Im trying to test various video/audio codecs by editing clips from larger videos that have the codecs I want to test. Although every video editor i have tried changes the codecs of the clips i create to different codecs than what the original used.

Are there any video editors out there where I can create clips of videos without changing the codecs of the original video...I want to create clips, yet keep the audio/video codecs in tact.

I have tried:

Windows Movie Maker

Avidemux 2.5

AVS Video Editor

VideoLAN Movie Creator

Answer 1

In many instances you can use ffmpeg to create a clip out of a longer clip, and request that the original frames are copied instead of re-encoded.

I'm writing this from memory so you may want to double check, but I believe the command line options you need to use for this are:

ffmpeg -i <source-filename> -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss <start-position> -t <duration> <destination-filename>

Answer 2

QuickTime Pro 7 does this, as long as the media is inside a QuickTime (.mov) container.

If I understand how it works correctly, it's because the player is able to play back the source material in a large number of ways (on the fly). You could have multiple clips on the screen with different geometric properties, multiple audio tracks, cuts, etc--and the player will just play back the appropriate parts of the media at the right time with the specified scaling, masking, and other attributes. The app itself is approaching obsolescence, and had a limited feature set to begin with, but it could do what you're talking about.

Also, many high-end non-linear video editing software will read many codecs natively and archive the highest-quality files for use when you actually encode your project (to avoid fidelity loss caused by multiple encodes and decodes in the editing process).

Answer 3

You could try VirtualDub since you haven't got it working yet.. I have only used it with AVI though..