Video Editor CLI

A powerful Node.js command-line interface (CLI) tool for automated video editing tasks, primarily focused on .mkv files. It optimizes common workflows such as silence removal, batch merging, and course processing with high-quality output.

Key Features

• Automatic Silence Removal: Detects and removes silence (start, end, or middle) using FFmpeg filters.
• Natural Sorting: Intelligently sorts files numerically (e.g., part2.mkv comes before part10.mkv).
• High-Quality Output: Default encoding uses libx264 with CRF 18 and slow preset for visually lossless results.
• Batch Processing: Orchestrates complex folder structures for courses or large collections.

Prerequisites

This tool depends on FFmpeg. You must have FFmpeg installed and available in your system's PATH.

• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install ffmpeg
• macOS: brew install ffmpeg
• Windows: Download from the official website or use winget install ffmpeg

Global Installation (Recommended)

To install and use video-editor from anywhere in your terminal without downloading the source code:

npm install -g @codedimension/video-editor

After installation, you can run the video-editor command directly.

Development Installation

If you want to run the CLI from source code:

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build the project
npm run build

To use the video-editor command locally during development:

1. Build the latest version:

   npm run build

2. Link the package globally:

   npm link

Source code changes will be reflected after each npm run build.

Commands

1. Remove Silence from Videos (remove-silence-of-videos or rsov)

The most advanced trimming command. It removes all silence sections from a batch of videos, including silence in the middle of a recording.

Arguments:

• [directory]: The directory containing .mkv files (Defaults to the current directory).

Options:

• --start <number>: Manual start time in seconds (overrides silence detection).
• --end <number>: Manual end time in seconds (overrides silence detection).

Features:

• Removes middle silence by default.
• Automatically skips files containing [skip] in their name.
• Exports processed files to a trimmed-videos subfolder as .mp4.

Example:

video-editor rsov ./raw_recordings --start 5 --end 120

2. Trim Silence (trim-silence)

A simpler version that focuses on removing silence only from the start and end of files.

Options:

• --input <path>: The path to a single .mkv file or a directory. (Required)
• --output <path>: The path where the trimmed file(s) should be saved. (Required)

Example:

video-editor trim-silence --input recording.mkv --output ./trimmed/

3. Merge Videos (merge-videos)

Merges multiple .mkv files into a single high-quality .mp4 file.

Options:

• --videosDir <path>: The directory containing the .mkv video files. (Required)
• --outputFile <path>: The exact path and filename for the resulting .mp4. (Required)

Features:

• Automatic Trimming: Detects and removes silence at the ends of each clip before merging.
• Natural Order: Merges files in numerical/natural order.
• High Quality: Uses CRF 18 and slow preset for the final export.

Example:

video-editor merge-videos --videosDir ./parts/ --outputFile final.mp4

4. Process Course (process-course)

Orchestrates a complete course editing workflow through a defined directory structure.

Input Structure:

/MyCourse
  /nao-editado
    /Module-1
      /Lesson-A
        - 1_intro.mkv
        - 2_demo.mkv
        - materials.pdf

Output Structure (/editado folder):

/MyCourse
  /editado
    /Module-1
      /Lesson-A
        - Lesson-A.mp4 (Merged and trimmed)
        - materials.pdf (Automatically copied)

Options:

• <coursePath>: Path to the course root folder. (Required)
• --skip-existing: Skips lessons that already have an output .mp4 file.

Example:

video-editor process-course /path/to/MyCourse --skip-existing

Technical Details

• Silence Detection: Threshold set at -30dB for at least 0.5s.
• Encoding Settings:
  • Video: libx264, pix_fmt yuv420p
  • Audio: aac
  • Quality: CRF 18, Preset: slow (optimized for high quality and reasonable file size).

Troubleshooting

• FFmpeg not found: Make sure the ffmpeg -version command works in your terminal.
• No silence detected: If the background noise is higher than -30dB, the tool might not detect silence correctly.