I recently downloaded an older movie from https://archive.org/
This organization is dedicated to basically backing up the entire Internet. Anyway the movie was MP4 format and it had a bunch of info promos in the beginning of the movie I wanted to cut out. It also had a bunch of stuff after the movie. So basically I want to remove this extra scenes leaving only the movie itself.
So I decided to go on line to find a decent movie splitter/cutter program and came across a free one called Free MP4 Splitter from http://www.mediafreeware.com/free-mp4-splitter.html The first thing I did was to upload this file to www.virustotal.com to check if there was any malware included. It got a clean report right on through.
First thing to do after downloading and installing, figure out how to use it. Didn't seem to have any help files associated with it. It's very similar to programs I've used before.
I marked a few things here to make it easier to understand.
The seek bar: click on hold down with the mouse and drag left or right to move the movie forward or back to quickly get to the point you want to clip out.
Start and End Markers: Little triangles just under the seekbar on either end. These also you can move left or right by clicking down with the mouse and holding while dragging left or right. The first one, furthest left, will make the beginning of the clip you want to save and the other will mark the end point.
Movie runtime: just points out the length of the movie and what point you are when watching it.
Start and End Time of Clip: You can also set the start and end markers through this area.
So open the file you want to clip/cut by clicking on the big green Open button on the right hand side of the program.
One grudge against this program is lack of progress bars. I opened the movie and expected to see a thumbnail of some kind or some message indicating that it was opening the file. It did not. So I clicked on the play button.
It didn't start right away and it was a large file about 1.8GB in size. So I waited a few seconds and hit it again, finally it started playing. So I hit the pause button. Like a lot of media players the Play button becomes a Pause button when a movie is playing.
Then I moved the seekbar slider to the beginning of the actual movie. Which was about 28 minutes into the file. I then moved the left hand start marker to try to get it has close to the seekbar slider as close as possible. This is where the Start Point and End Point timers at the bottom of the program comes in handy.
I can high light the minutes, in my example (28) or seconds (03) and click on the triangles that point up or down to adjust the time.
Then I have to do the same thing for the end of the movie. I was going to cut out the closing credits altogether but changed my mind after. Whatever is between these two markers will what be saved as your clip/movie.
Once you have thses points set go to the right hand side of the program. You've already loaded the movie. For splitting you could just split it into 2 or more equal parts, you don't have to worry about setting the markers for this.
In my case I do want to Split Using Cut Points so I check that option and choose my output folder by clicking on the Select Output Directory (you can open it to if you want to). I'm just using my Desktop.
Then you have to click on the yellow Add Current Selection button. You'll then notice the information appear in the white box underneath. I haven't tried it but I'm getting the impression you can add more than one clip at a time.
When all is done click on the Green Split button. Again my only complaint, no progress bar except, at the bottom now you'll see Processing: 1/1 CutPoints and now a Red Stop button.
So how do you know when it's finished? The processing message goes away along with the Red stop button. And the bottom bar turns completely green.
My files was 2 hours long and 1.8 GB in size. The end result was 1 hour 29 minutes long and a file size of 1.3 GB. And the biggest surprise it only took about 3 minutes to finish.
If you go to their site http://www.mediafreeware.com you'll see they have a host of other Free utilities available. My guess most of the video cutters work the same way.