I Made a Video Editor Specifically for DEV.to Writers

#python #opensource #showdev #productivity

How many times have you taken a screen recording and wished you could quickly crop the taskbar down there, trim the start and end so no one sees you opening OBS Studio, cut and delete the part where you fell asleep, export it as an optimized animated GIF or WebP, and drag and drop it directly to your DEV.to post?

Opening DaVinci Resolve for this purpose is overkill. Even if you open it anyway, you will not be able to crop your video like this:

In my opinion, this is the most useful feature of this app. Many video editors force you to pick a canvas resolution and won't allow you to change it this way.

But other than that, it also supports the following features (note: these features were written by Gemini):

Non-Destructive Multi-Clip Timeline:
- Split video segments anywhere (S key).
- Drag and drop clips to reorder them on the fly.
- Drag clip edges to trim start and end points with live preview.
Flexible Export Options:
- Export to WebP, GIF, MP4, WebM, MOV, or MKV.
- Adjust framerate (0.5 to 60 FPS), scaling/resolution %, and quality settings (automatic palette generation with dither controls for GIFs).
Fast Timeline Navigation & Controls:
- Scroll, zoom (Ctrl + Wheel), and pan (Middle-click drag) through complex timelines.
- Frame-by-frame navigation using arrow keys.
Seamless Preview:
- Automatic background proxy generation for codecs not natively supported by Qt.

As of now, it works, and it is useful. I have tested it quite a bit and fixed many issues. But still, it is not a polished product yet, and it requires FFmpeg to work. Installing FFmpeg is very easy. In Windows, just run winget install Gyan.FFmpeg.

I have opened a few issues myself. They contain a few things I have tried (but couldn't do), and also things that I'll add in the future: