Note on the specific intervals: that's where the clever optimization comes in: leave as-is (passthrough) all not affected sections of the video (basically everything) and only recode the tiny fraction that needs recoding due to the cut being set on a non-keyframe.

That one, I do believe should get more research and implementations. Currently I only know of LosslessCut's "Smart" mode, but I'd like to see other big players of the video editing space improving the state of the art in that direction for simple cuts.

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Youden 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I wonder, rather than re-encoding when starting on a B- or P- frame, could you preserve the entire GOP losslessly but make the earlier content "disappear" on playback by shifting PTS, or bundling several frames into a single frame's payload? Maybe it causes too many problems with players.

	▲	j1elo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's an idea that got some discussion but generally is strongly discouraged. Cutting must mean that the underlying bytes are absolutely not there in the final result, otherwise it will cause data leaks that users would very reasonably expect not to be there. Imagine "smart cutting" a critically compromising part of a video (e.g. showing some personal info) only to later find out that the actual footage was still there, it just needed some timestamp shifting to unveil.