Table of Contents / Chapter Marks

Help/How To
1

I’m currently working on an introductory video for our faculty and I realised that it would be nice to implement a table of contents of some sort to give viewers the chance to click on a certain topic in order to jump to the point in the video where the topic is being addressed. (like time stamps on youtube)
Is such a feature provided by Shotcut?

1 Like
2

No.

3

Shotcut does not create interactive video. The interactive features you experience on YouTube are because the video is in a web page or app and combined with extra data. There are no strong or well-adopted standards for interactive video.

4

This sounds more like chapter markers rather than a table of contents linking to a set of independent videos. Shotcut does not have native support for chapter markers (or TOC for that matter).

For those willing to use FFmpeg command line to add chapter markers to a video after it is exported, here is a way to do it:

Note that -map_metadata 1 and -map_chapters 1 must both be specified.

Here is a description of the FFMETADATA file that says where in time the chapter marks go:

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#Metadata-1

Note that the names of the keys are case-sensitive.

1 Like
5

How good is the player support for chapter marks? I am thinking about Windows 10 TV & Movies app, Quicktime Player for macOS, and basic html5 playback in browsers.

6

Movies and TV: No

Windows Media Player: No

QuickTime on macOS: Unsure (don’t have one)

HTML5: Not directly from MP4. Options are to add <track> nodes in the <video> element, or create a WebVTT file that Video.js and other players can use to show markers. WebVTT can be built from markers already in the MP4. It looks a lot like subtitle SRT SubRip files.

VLC: Yes

MPC-BE: Yes

7

It would be awesome if Shotcut could add chapters at each edit or clip marker. I’ve manually made chapters many times (OGM .TXT style), not difficult but tedious and time consuming (and errors are easy to make). Shotcut has all the timing info already, I wish it could dump edit or clip markers to a file. Edit: I now see in the MLT file under “playlist” there are timing codes, that’s helpful.

Also: Plex and MPV (and MPV.NET) also support these chapters (via MKV, thanks to MkvToolNix).

8

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