Create Family-Friendly Edits of Movies

Use the Edit Decision Lists option in MPlayer to create a special list of video edits to perform on a file to mute or skip entire sections of a video during playback.

When I was younger, some weekends we would have movie night at home where we would rent a movie and watch it together. I was the youngest in the group, and when a movie we rented contained some questionable content, my stepdad would sit, remote control at the ready, and mute offensive language or say “hide your eyes” while he fast-forwarded. I remember one movie in particular that contained a lot of profanity. It seemed that no matter how hard he tried, my stepdad would mute dialogue only to unmute right as a character screamed some profanity, and then he would quickly press mute again to silence the rest of the dialogue only to unmute at yet another profanity—a losing battle. If only he had MPlayer and its EDL (Edit Decision Lists) feature, he could have set up the mutes and edits ahead of time.

An EDL is basically a text file with start and stop editing points, and an action to perform (either mute or skip). If the action is set to mute, MPlayer simply mutes that section of the video; if set to skip, MPlayer skips the section entirely.

While the natural application for this might be editing out content in a movie that might not be suitable for children, you could also use it to edit content that is merely annoying. As an example, go back to the time when Star Wars Episode I—The ...

Get Linux Multimedia Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.