TL;DR - Can we get support for reading MP4 chapter markers when a media file is imported, and setting Shotcut timeline markers to match them ? I can see that it might need to be an option after a timeline is created and video appended to it.
This doesn’t appear to be on the roadmap, nor in the changelogs since the Debian 13/trixie version I’m using, 25.03.31.
I’ve just started using Shotcut to replace Davinci Resolve. I mostly work with video gameplay clips.
I’d just use Steam’s game recording, but there are issues around audio with respect to VOIP, so instead I’m planning to go back to OBS. The one convenience I like with Steam recording is a hotkey to save the last 30s to its own file.
In lieu of this I’m planning on making use of OBS’s ability to write a chapter marker, upon hotkey press, when using its “Hybrid MP4” output format. VLC happily reads these, showing them under Playback > Chapter.
Rather than needing to load the video in VLC, find the timestamp for each chapter marker and then duplicate those manually in Shotcut it would be hugely convenient if Shotcut had an option to automatically insert timeline markers from an imported MP4 file that has them.
A thing that makes this tricky is that Shotcut is not single-file oriented and does not yet have clip markers. Chapter marks in a file are more like clip markers. If you want to treat them as timeline markers, then what happens when the single-file-with-chapters you add to the timeline first is dropped somewhere not at the beginning (by manually adding a track)? What happens when one drags multiple files at once to the timeline, possibly with multiple containing chapter marks? It is tricky. Maybe the only thing we can do is to add an item to the Properties menu: Extract Chapters as Markers. This would run something like
ffprobe -v quiet -print_format csv -show_chapters input.mp4
And then add them to the timeline markers with zero offset. Meanwhile, you can do that yourself.
Thanks for the speedy reply! I appreciate the potential issues with the current paradigms. Still, even if it only covered the simple case of “single media file, single extant timeline” it would really speed things along to have an option to import such markers when a media file is added to a project. It could be gated by a check to see if things are already “too complicated”, either aborting (with notice to the user), or asking the user to clarify what timeline, and at what offset they’d like the markers added ?
Also, to be clear, with this “extract to CSV” method I’d currently still have to manually add each marker to my timeline, yes ? At least I couldn’t find anything in documentation or tutorials about an automatic import method from CSV. This would still be faster than having to pick them out using VLC, so thanks for the heads up on that workflow.