Recommend me a SuperVLC that can Edit, Loop, etc not just Play videos

In My Humble Opinion
1

Eons and eons ago, before candy-colored iMacs and the disappearance of the floppy disk, I shelled out for an Apple product called QuickTime Pro. It wasn’t a separate program; instead, it unlocked some menu items that were already built in to QuickTime Player 7. Dear God, was the “7” originally a reference to System 7? Naah, not THAT old, surely…

Amazingly, the additional features kept on working through all the eras of MacOS upgrades: I could select a portion of the video, copy, paste into a new one or into an existing one, delete the selected material, play only the selected clip, loop, superimpose layers with degrees of transparency, change the default display size, add or remove audio tracks, and so on. It made QuickTime Player 7, which was otherwise just a video-playback utility, into a pretty versatile lightweight video editor.

Unfortunately there’s a difference between “still runs” and “has been maintained”, and venerable (practically antediluvian) old QuickTime Player 7 + QTPro can’t open and playback very many of the codecs in use, and people with no video-editing capacity at all send me files of many different extensions and codecs and ask me to do clever things with them. (Talk about your one-eyed guy being king in the land of the blind…)

Meanwhile, I’ve got this cute little program, VLC, which can open and play damn near anything you throw at it. But it doesn’t edit at all. Can’t copy and paste or anything.

I’d like something with the can-open-them-all powers of VLC but the editing abilities of QuickTime Player 7/Pro, preferably without hopping all the way up to a full-blown video editing suite like Final Cut or Premiere or even the various high-end sharewares. Just, you know, a little Swiss Army Knife lightweight thing for quick-n-dirty edits and alterations.

Recommend me? MacOS, elderly OS version support appreciated although I can the new stuff if I need to.

2

Your Mac should have iMovie on it already. It won’t quite open “anything” like VLC but it opens enough. I’ve edited video using GarageBand before.

3

I use iMovie for some things, but it needs to convert the source video to whatever it “thinks in” (probably uncompressed high resolution) and that’s time-consuming and then it has to be exported back out if the original format is desired. Also, iMovie from back in the PowerPC days was easy to use – easy to establish “start here” and “end here” points – in ways that Apple screwed with or stripped out. And it makes large auxiliary “project” files sprinkled hither and yon that I have to ferret out and delete later. So I hate working with it for anything. Definitely not Swiss Army Knife candidate, I’m afraid.

4

Avidemux? Kdenlive?

5

It’s not free but I use the Vidmore suite of tools for simple conversions and quick editing. I use it on a PC but they have a Mac version. Free demo is available. Supported formats listed halfway down the page:

6

I’m just astounded that you’ve got QTPlayer7 running at all. This was a pure-32bit app; didn’t Apple abandon 32-bit apps several years ago?

I’m curious: what codecs aren’t supported in your QTPlayer7 ?

Also, I think you’re one of the 27 people (I was one) who figured out how to edit video in QTPlayer7. Nice.

7

I don’t run any OS newer than Mojave except in virtual machines. My main personal computer is still on El Capitan. I’m at “work” right now so I’m on the newer laptop running Mojave. Mojave is the last one that will still run 32 bit apps.

8

Downloaded Vidmore. It doesn’t appear that it opens videos and lets you play them. It’s more that you aim a given edit function at a video and it then applies that edit function.

I guess I wasn’t explicit about it, but I do want the “Swiss Army Knife” app to be able to plain-old “open and play” any videos I aim it at. I just also want to be able to select a sub-portion of it and play only that bit; play it at half speed; copy or cut; paste elsewhere; split the sound from the video; that sort of thing. But whatever I go with, I want to use it as my everyday playback utility that can also do these things.

9

I doubt you’d find anything like this. Apple tried monetizing QTPlayer7 at (as I recall) $35 a seat to unlock those menu items. It wasn’t successful and QT died. I can’t imagine another player “player” would do well with your feature set.

10

Avidemux: on Mojave says it requires 10.15. I launch my virtual machine with Catalina on it and copy Avidemux into it. For unknown reasons it won’t launch there. (No, I don’t have it set up to only allow apps from the Apple app store to run; it’s something else). Will experiment further, perhaps in Big Sur or Ventura VMs.

Kdenlive: on Mojave it won’t even open the .dmg file, says Apple cant check it for malicious software. “This software need to be updated. Contact the developer for more info”. (There are reasons I like the older MacOS environments better. Stupid kindergarten teacher nannystate bs annoys me).

11

Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me. Too bad. I’d pay for it, it’s not about the money. I’d rather have a $290 slim nimble app that can play videos but also edit them than a $290 “suite” app that takes over my screens with palettes and toolbars and is all aimed at high-end functionality I’ll rarely use.

12

Kdenlive dmg file opens under Catalina in the virtual machine. And unlike Avidemux, application launches fine. The interface is one of those “take over the whole screen with palettes and tool drawers” things, but that’s not really a dealbreaker. But it won’t directly open files, I have to “add” them as “clips” to the “project”. Definitely not an improvement over iMovie at this point, and especially not if I have to run it in a virtual machine.

13

I haven’t used anything like this on a Mac so I can’t make a recommendation, but I would look for a front-end to ffmpeg. It should have the editing functionality you want; you’ll have to try it to see if the UI is acceptable.

14

Well… let me open one in QT Player 7… go to movie info… this one says it is a DX50 video track, this is an old file, I’m at my “work” computer, so this is not necessarily typical of what I encounter on the other computer. Also, the older computer has more codecs loaded onto it as I kept trying to patch over QuickTime’s holes.

15

Huh, I’d have thought QTPlayer7 could open DivX5 video, but once upon a time you had to install 3rd party codecs and that mechanism is these days abandoned. There are no QT 3rd parties any more though legacy stuff floats around as I’m sure you’re finding. It’s a mess, sorry :confused:

16

Avidemux works fine under Ventura (virtual machine), opens the file directly (I don’t have to “add” it to a “project” even if that’s what it actually does when I “open” it), less cluttery interface. But although I found where to insert a “start selection” and “end selection” marker and there’s a Copy command, there’s no “New” or “New video” command into which to try to paste it.

17

You know, you can use VLC as a format converter. Media->Convert/Save. It doesn’t take a selection, and it’s flaky as hell but it mostly works. You can convert that DX50 video to H.264+AAC or whatever that QTPlayer7 could deal with. Not ideal, not even close, but it is a path.

18

In Avidemux, I tested that I am able to select a clip using “A” and “B”, which results in a blue rectangle. Then I choose “Save” from the File menu, give it a different filename, and the clip gets saved there.

Kdenlive, while it may not have the best GUI around, does indeed work differently, as you noticed: you are meant to be working on a “project” and the “clips” are raw footage that does not get changed directly; instead you use them however you want in your project, and when all is done you “render” your project into an output video.

19

MPEG Streamclip may be what you are after. It can do all those things and can usually play most formats you open with it.
http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

(Btw I also love QuickTimePro 7 and use it all the time.)

20

I have MPEG Streamclip already. But not updated in a long long time. I’ll re-examine it, thanks for reminding me.