Editing videos without editing the video

[andycurtis]

It would be nice to have an ability to play a dvd or video file with an edit file. The edit file would skip certain sections of the video content, possibly blot out a rectangle of the video for a few seconds, or simply mute the video. If you could do this and then make these edit files be put into open source, people could watch videos with scenes edited (like to remove pornography or crude speech - or whatever).

An edit file could have a simple format...

VIDEO_IDENTIFIER
CUT 24:00 5 # would cut 5 seconds out of the video at the 24th minute
MUTE 16:00 0.25 # would mute 0.25 seconds out of the video at the 16th minute
CUT 30:00 20 50 100 200 200 # would create a black box at coordinates 50,100 which is 200 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall at the 30th minute for 20 seconds

If these files could be shared, then many people could contribute to creating clean movies. I know it may not be the intention of your software, but if you supported cutting features as described above, others could create a parallel project which creates the clean movies.

- Andy

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Why would someone destroy a movies' director work?
If the director want crude sentence or pornography, it may be wanted and part of the work.

Anyway, it shouldn't be hard to implement, but I am not sure a developer has time to do that.

[andycurtis]

I thought it would be nice to not have to actually edit a movie, but instead could tell the player what edits would exist. I think this would make a great feature of VLC (without getting into whether we are destroying another's work

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

there is a goto time function, so it cannot be hard to implement.