Welcome to the Jungle

Lossless trimming is the ability to trim, cut or extract segments of audio & video without re-encoding the original multimedia streams, maintaining both the original frames/samples and their related metadata. It is a process as old as digital video itself, and one that can be extremely helpful when dealing with hundreds or thousands of hours of digital video evidence for a case.

Reduce file size, reduce duration and maintain the original frames & quality. Bonus, the process is even faster than traditional editing, as you don't have to wait for the video to be re-encoded!

That's a tall order, right?  VLC from VideoLAN.org has become the go-to media player for most, as it can play so many things that Windows Media Player won't, and it's free.  Well, how does it do that, play more than other players?  The Libavformat and Libavcodec libraries, the same ones created by and for the FFmpeg project (and so many other multimedia applications). 

VLC & DirectShow Filters

DirectShow is one of Microsoft's multimedia frameworks, formerly known as ActiveMovie, which replaced Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows framework.  VLC supports DirectShow-based input sources through a module (not very well, IMO, though), but the default Windows version downloaded from VideoLAN cannot reference 32-bit DirectShow filters installed on your Windows PC for audio/video decoding (i.e. filters/codecs registered in your Windows Registry), as the default version downloaded is x64.

As an example, a DCCTV video file exported from a GeoVision system to an AVI file may be using the proprietary GMP4 video codec. In order to play the video, you must install the GeoVision GMP4 codec necessary to decode the primary video stream; this is a DirectShow filter.  DirectShow filters can only be referenced by applications that can leverage DirectShow, which we've established, VLC x64 cannot. 

If you have a Dropbox account, you have Dropbox Replay.  I've been so impressed with the implementation, and I keep thinking of more ways to use it.  Obviously, you can invite others to comment on and review videos in your Dropbox account (Frame-level review with comments & annotations), but you can do so much more. 

One of the coolest features is the live review capabilities, IMHO.  In any case, rather than regurgitating all of their marketing stuff about it, here's a short video from Dropbox. 😎

Here are the currently supported file types for uploading to our Downloads area: