Not sure what you mean by container repacking, but if you mean "Converting to supported codec", you can try instead from the File menu to convert using the "Fast: Full quality remux (no audio), likely to fail"-method. that is much faster and if it works it allows native scrubbing. Also I'm planning on improving the "Unsupported videos" experience in the future by using something like the MediaStream API
Which exact experience with using an electron app are you talking about that some people don't like? The size or memory usage? I get that some people like to run multiple apps at the same time and are running out of memory, but I think many other apps use more memory than Electron based apps. Of course trying to reduce the memory footprint of an app is always a good thing, so that's indeed a trade-off.
> I get this perspective from the developer point of view
I'd argue also for most end users' point of view as they will most likely get a more stable app when the average developer doesn't have to write C/C++.
> The thing is, I have dozens or hundreds of tiny little utilities like this installed that make one-off tasks that I do once a month or so much easier. I can't afford for them to be Electron based on my 128 GB SSD.
That's a fair point. I also feel the pain of installing large apps on my MacBook with 256GB SSD. But I think I would still take a large app with all the other benefits than an app that might SEGFAULT all the time, but is small because it's written in C/C++ (like what has been my experience with avidemux for example).
> On Linux, the norm is that distribution maintainers put together a package with the dependencies separate, and these are shared between multiple packages
I get this point, and I used to be an avid Gentoo user myself so I compiled everything from scratch and liked the small size and efficiency of a dynamically linked system. I think the biggest drawback with this approach is that sometimes sharing libraries with "compatible" versions will cause bugs because those versions actually have certain tiny differences that cause bugs to appear, whereas with a static build you lock down the whole dependency tree (except the OS level libs), so you know almost for sure that the app is going to work exactly the same regardless of the system you run it on.
Actually because the bundled JS itself is quite small for LosslessCut (32MB), it would be theoretically possible to bring-your-own electron (even from source), e.g. use a single system-installed electron that can be shared by many different electron apps, as well as use the system installed ffmpeg. Then you could run `electron Resources/app.asar`. It might be possible to setup such a minimal build.
I just discovered this post, and I'm really happy to see a lot of satisfied long time users as well as excited new users who recently discovered this.
I think the most common criticism is that the app is large and uses a lot of memory (compared to Notepad?:P) due to it being Electron based. Somewhat unpopular opinion, but here goes: Developing an app using Electron gives such tremendous benefits that it far outweighs any downsides. It lets you easily build a cross-OS app on a super optimised, stable and secure platform that's being battle tested by billions of people around the world every day (Chromium). It gives you all the features of the web, and it "just works" on almost any popular OS. The web has all the big tech pushing new features and improvements all the time and it maintains really good backwards compatibility. I don't think I ever had the LosslessCut app actually crash on me. CI, automatic building and releasing to all different kinds of channels is a breeze due to tools like `electron-builder`.
I think if you compare it to most other lossy video editors, you'll find that the CPU usage is much lower (especially per minute of produced video!), and the memory footprint is probably lower than many other popular video editors. Storage is cheap, and what is 500mb when working with 4K video anyways, so optimising for size is mostly a waste of time and doesn't really benefit 99% of users. Counter arguments are welcome :)
If you mean a video where the camera was rotated while recording, I believe no, that's not possible to do losslessly. I believe the orientation flag stored in the metadata cannot change over time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- author
HEVC is supported in the latest beta version, if your computer has a hardware HEVC decoder. It's a WIP as HEVC support was just recently introduced into Chromium (source: author)