How Lynx cuts a clip without downloading the whole video
A 35 second clip came down as 11 MB in 29 seconds. The whole video would have been 255 MB. Here is how.
Clipping is the feature Lynx is built around: pick the seconds you need, choose a shape, and get only that part. The obvious way to do it is to download the whole video and cut it afterwards. That works, and it wastes your time and your data. So Lynx decides how to get each clip before it fetches a single byte.
11 MB instead of 255 MBA 35 second clip from a long video, measured: 11 MB in 29 seconds, against 255 MB for the whole thing.
Four ways to get a clip
- If you already downloaded the video, Lynx cuts from the file on your disk. Nothing is fetched again.
- If you clip the same video twice, the second clip reuses what the first one fetched.
- For videos longer than 10 minutes, Lynx fetches only the section you asked for.
- For short videos, fetching the whole thing once is faster than many small requests, so Lynx does that and keeps it for the next clip.
Exact frames, checked
Since Lynx 1.1.2, clips are cut on whole frames: a 10 second clip at 25 frames per second has exactly 250 frames. Every clip is checked before it is marked done, so an empty or cut-short file shows up as a failure instead of a surprise later.
Five shapes
The same range can come out as video, vertical 9:16, square, GIF or audio. Vertical and square let you drag the frame to choose what stays in the picture.