Yalc — Yet Another Lossless Cutter

A keyboard-friendly, frame-accurate lossless video cutter for Windows, Linux and macOS. Trim segments out of long recordings without re-encoding — cuts are lossless (stream copy via ffmpeg) so a 5-second clip of a 4K HDR file finishes in seconds and the output is bit-identical to the source.

Built on Avalonia 12 / .NET 10 with libmpv embedded directly for smooth, frame-accurate scrubbing.

Features

• Frame-accurate scrubbing — drag the timeline, jump 1 frame at a time with , / .
• Multi-segment cuts — mark several in/out points; queue runs them as separate output files (or merged into one)
• Custom timeline with thumbnail strip, hover preview, zoom + pan, audio waveform overlay, and per-segment color bands
• Queue with persistence — cuts survive app restarts; failed jobs keep their error reason
• Open from folder — bulk-load a directory of videos as a playlist with size / sort filters
• Plugin system — extend output-path routing, settings, status badges and file-picker filtering without touching core. See Plugins/README.md.
• Configurable — auto-mute, auto-delete source after cut, low-priority cutting (so it doesn't fight foreground apps), shutdown PC when queue is done

Install

Prebuilt releases

Download the matching archive for your OS from the latest release:

OS	File
Windows x64	Yalc-win-x64.zip
Linux x64	Yalc-linux-x64.tar.gz
Linux arm64	Yalc-linux-arm64.tar.gz
macOS Intel	Yalc-osx-x64.tar.gz
macOS Apple Silicon	Yalc-osx-arm64.tar.gz

Releases are self-contained — no .NET runtime required.

Windows

1. Unzip Yalc-win-x64.zip anywhere
2. Double-click Yalc.exe
3. On first run Yalc detects that libmpv-2.dll and the FFmpeg shared libraries are missing and offers to download them (~80 MB, one-time). They're placed next to Yalc.exe — your system PATH isn't touched. Yalc restarts itself once the download is done.

If you'd rather install manually, drop libmpv-2.dll (from the shinchiro mpv-dev archive) and the FFmpeg shared DLLs (from BtbN) next to Yalc.exe and skip the first-run prompt.

Linux

1. Extract: tar xzf Yalc-linux-x64.tar.gz
2. Install runtime dependencies via your package manager:
   • Debian / Ubuntu: sudo apt install libmpv2 ffmpeg
   • Fedora: sudo dnf install mpv-libs ffmpeg
   • Arch: sudo pacman -S mpv ffmpeg
3. Run: ./Yalc

Optional desktop integration: copy yalc.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/ and the bundled icon to ~/.local/share/icons/.

macOS

Status: macOS bundles are experimental. Video playback uses libmpv's render API path; please file an issue if you hit problems on your hardware.

1. Install Homebrew if you don't have it:

   /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

   Then follow the post-install hint to add brew to your shell PATH.

2. Install dependencies: brew install mpv ffmpeg

3. Extract the bundle: tar xzf Yalc-osx-arm64.tar.gz (use the x64 variant on Intel Macs).

4. Bypass Gatekeeper. Yalc is ad-hoc signed (no paid Apple Developer ID), so macOS blocks first launch with "Apple could not verify that 'Yalc' is free of malware". Pick one of the following:

   • Strip the quarantine attribute, then open normally:

     xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/Yalc.app
     open /path/to/Yalc.app

   • Manual override: double-click the bundle, dismiss the warning, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, and click "Open Anyway" next to the Yalc entry. This whitelists the specific bundle on the specific machine.

Keyboard

Key	Action
Space	Play / pause
← / →	Seek 1 second
, / .	Step one frame back / forward
S / E	Set in / out point on most-recent segment
A	Add a 5-second segment at the playhead
Ctrl + scroll	Zoom timeline (cursor pivots)
Shift + scroll	Pan timeline
Middle-drag	Pan timeline
Scroll	Seek (60s by default)
Drag-and-drop files	Load as playlist

Building from source

Prerequisites: .NET 10 SDK.

git clone https://github.com/<you>/Yet-Another-Lossless-Cutter.git
cd Yet-Another-Lossless-Cutter
dotnet build Yalc.sln

For development you'll also need libmpv and ffmpeg locally — see Yalc/native/ for placement (the csproj copies them into the build output if present).

Plugins

YALC ships with no opinion about output-path routing or workflow-specific filters — those live in plugins under Plugins/. Drop a sibling .csproj and it gets auto-included via a glob in the main project. Compile-time linked, NativeAOT-clean — see Plugins/README.md for the contract and a minimal example.

Screenshots

License

GPL-3.0. Yalc dynamically links to libmpv and FFmpeg at runtime (via the first-run auto-download). The pre-built libmpv binaries from shinchiro and the FFmpeg gpl-shared builds from BtbN include GPL-licensed components, so the combined work is GPL.

If you need to embed Yalc in a non-GPL pipeline, you'd need to fork it, swap the downloader to LGPL builds (BtbN ships lgpl-shared variants; an LGPL libmpv would have to be self-built), and re-license your fork accordingly.