There are many reasons to cut or split a video file. For example, one may want to cut a long video into multiple parts to upload to YouTube. I first ran into this and this, which suggests:
<pre class="src src-sh">ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:01:00 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -i in.avi out.avi
## -ss: start position ## -t: end position ## can re-encode with other codecs
However, for some reason my out file is almost as large as my in file, even though I’m only sampling 1 minute out of the 2 hour segment. This lead me to the mencoder solution:
<pre class="src src-sh">mencoder -ss 00:00:00 -endpos 00:00:01 -ovc copy -oac copy in.avi -o out.avi
The file size of my out file is more reasonable, and the speed is incredibly fast since I am not re-encoding.