How to cut video on Mac without FFmpeg

The FFmpeg setup problem

FFmpeg is a brilliant piece of software. But getting it running on a Mac involves a chain of steps that each have their own failure modes:

• Installing Homebrew, which modifies your system PATH and requires Xcode Command Line Tools.
• Running brew install ffmpeg and waiting for dependencies to compile.
• Dealing with macOS Gatekeeper quarantine prompts when running a downloaded binary.
• Figuring out the exact flags: -ss before or after -i? -c copy for lossless? -avoid_negative_ts?
• Version differences between machines breaking scripts that worked last year.

Most people who want to trim a clip are not systems engineers. They just want to remove the first and last 30 seconds of a file.

How Lossless Video Cutter works without FFmpeg

The app is built on AVFoundation - Apple's native media framework, the same one macOS and iOS use internally for all media operations. Preview, keyframe detection, lossless packet copy, and export all happen through AVFoundation APIs that ship with every Mac.

There is no subprocess spawning, no PATH lookups, no shell escaping. The app opens your video file directly and writes the output file directly, with no intermediary process involved.

What you can trim without FFmpeg

MKV note

AVFoundation does not support MKV natively. Lossless Video Cutter bundles a small MKV muxer/demuxer that reads and writes MKV files by copying compressed packets - no re-encoding, no FFmpeg dependency. If FFmpeg happens to be installed on your Mac, the app may optionally use it for a display-aspect-ratio metadata tweak after export, but core trimming never depends on it being present.

When you might still want FFmpeg

FFmpeg remains the right tool for format conversion (e.g. MKV to ProRes), adding filters, processing at pipeline scale with shell scripts, or batch operations that need fine-grained codec control. For trimming existing files without quality loss, Lossless Video Cutter removes the need entirely.