vedit

vedit is a small Rust command-line wrapper that runs auto-editor to remove silent parts from a video and then uses ffmpeg to adjust playback speed. It automates the two-step process: run auto-editor with a configurable margin, then apply video and audio speed filters with ffmpeg.

This repository contains a minimal CLI (see src/main.rs) that expects auto-editor and ffmpeg to be available on your PATH.

Requirements

• Rust (stable) — to build the project
• auto-editor — installed and available on your PATH
• ffmpeg — installed and available on your PATH

Note: vedit assumes that after running: auto-editor <input> --margin <N>sec an altered file will exist with the same stem as the input and the suffix _ALTERED (e.g. video.mp4 -> video_ALTERED.mp4). Ensure your auto-editor installation/version produces that output or configure/move the file accordingly.

Building

From cargo:

cargo install vedit

From the project root:

# Build in release mode, binary will be in ~/.cargo/bin
cargo install --path .

Usage

Basic invocation:

vedit <input> --margin <seconds> --speed <factor> --output <output>

Arguments:

• <input> — Path to the input video file (positional).
• --margin — Margin in seconds passed to auto-editor (float, e.g. 0.2).
• --speed — Playback speed factor applied with ffmpeg (float, e.g. 1.25, 1.5, 2.0).
• --output — Output filename for the final processed video.

Example:

# Remove silent parts (with 0.2s margin) then speed playback 1.5x, writing to output.mp4
vedit input.mp4 --margin 0.2 --speed 1.5 --output output.mp4

How it works

The CLI performs the following steps:

1. Parses arguments using clap.
2. Runs:
   • auto-editor <input> --margin <margin>sec
   • Expects an altered file named <stem>_ALTERED.<ext> to exist after that command.
3. Runs ffmpeg on the altered file to change speed:
   • Video filter: setpts=PTS/<speed>
   • Audio filter: atempo=<speed>
4. Writes the final file to the path provided by --output.

The code returns errors when the external commands exit with non-zero status:

• If auto-editor fails, the program reports auto-editor failed.
• If ffmpeg fails, the program reports ffmpeg failed.

Limitations and caveats

• atempo accepts only certain ranges per filter invocation (commonly 0.5–2.0). If you pass a --speed outside ffmpeg's single-step atempo range, ffmpeg may fail. A robust solution would chain multiple atempo filters for larger speed multipliers (not implemented here).
• The tool relies on auto-editor producing an altered file with the _ALTERED suffix. If your auto-editor version uses a different naming pattern, you'll need to rename the altered file before vedit runs ffmpeg, or modify the code.
• This is a thin wrapper: all heavy lifting is done by auto-editor and ffmpeg. vedit does not attempt to parse or modify media streams itself.

Contributing

This project is intentionally small. If you want to:

• Support chaining atempo for arbitrary speeds,
• Make the altered filename configurable,
• Add better logging or dry-run mode,

feel free to open a PR or modify src/main.rs.