New in version 0.6: Edit with Twitch chat history!

It has been little over a week since version 0.5 dropped, but I’ve cooked up a new release for you. The big new feature is the ability to download stream chat history from Twich/YouTube/Facebook VODs and to use them to guide your editing, to find highlights, etc.

Get the new version for your platform from the downloads page.

Chat history visualization

Here’s the new tool UI and the chat visualization of one of my old Bannerlord streams.

Chat history visualization shows that the chat was most active between first and second hours of the stream.

The peaks and valleys in the chat timeline show times when the chat was more or less active. This can be used to find parts of the stream that were more or less engaging for the viewers.

Automatic highlights from chat activity

Together with the chat visualization, there is now a tool to automatically cut the highlights from a stream based on peaks in chat activity.

The automatic highlights feature works better with medium and large streams, because the chat is more active in general and gives a better signal for highlights. Here I’ve ran automatic highlights feature with a Dota 2 stream VOD from Wagamama.

Pretty much all of the automatic highlights were points where TTS messages made the streamer laugh.

Export video settings

When exporting videos, there is now new section to choose between different video cutting modes and a setting to control video re-encoding quality.

When cutting videos, you can now choose between:

Default of “Smart cutting”, e.g. recoding only around the cutpoints to get the best of all words: accurate cuts, fast exports and lossless quality where possible
Cutting only on keyframes. This is the default in tools like lossless-cut and it enables true lossless quality exports. Downside is that cut timings are moved to the nearest keyframe.
Recoding the whole export. This is a fallback option if all else fails for some reason.

The quality setting controls the recoding quality when using either smart cutting or recode all modes. The normal should be good enough for most use and the higher quality options give only marginal improvements to the overall quality.

There is also a lossless encoding mode which only works if the input video has a codec that supports lossless encoding. Lossless encoding can lead to truly massive output files.

Other fixes

This version also has decent amount of performance and quality of life fixes.

I managed to speed up the audio loading and processing by ~10% with small Cython optimization.
Transcript text view is now updated more frequently as new text arrives.
New text to transcription view is also updated with strikethroughs if that part of the video has been cut before the transcript was done.
The transcript search UX is also much better now. It handles cases like reaching the end of document nicer (jumps to the last match).

Going forward

In the upcoming weeks I plan to focus on making YouTube content about Smart Media Cutter. This probably means that development will be slower for the next 2-3 weeks. Expect the next release to come in September.

Hopefully this version is already good for regular use and there isn’t need for urgent fixes. But if you do encounter any problems or have any requests, the Discord server for Smart Media Cutter has started to grow nicely and you can contact me for anything there.