Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing Emacs can’t do. Which, of course, is why some people love it, and some people hate it. Apparently, [mbork] loves it and devised a scheme to show a video (with a little help), accept cut-in and out marks, and then use ffmpeg to output the video clip, ready for posting, emailing, or whatever.

This was made easier by work already done to allow Emacs to create subtitles (subed). Of course, Emacs by itself can’t play videos, but it can take control of mpv, which can. Interestingly, subed doesn’t insist on mpv since it won’t work on Windows, but without it, your editing experience won’t be as pleasant.

Back to creating a clip, once you have control of mpv, it is almost too simple. A keybinding remembers where mpv is when you mark the beginning, and another one grabs the end mark, works out the arguments, and calls ffmpeg to do the actual work.

This is one of those cases where Emacs really isn’t doing much of the work; it is more of a sophisticated scripting, orchestration, and user-interface system. But it reminds us of the old Russian proverb: The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.

Emacs is a hot topic of debate in the Hackaday bunker. Some of us have our browsers emacs-ified. We hear a rumor that one among us may even boot directly into the editor. But not all of us, of course.