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I can't seem to figure out the solution to a very simple problem. I want to trim a video in Handbrake and keep the video as is (resolution, encoding, etc), just chop off the first few seconds, but I can't find out how.

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Since I didn't get any answers here, for future visitors, the feature isn't very pronounced on the interface. Basically you click on the Chapters dropdown and select Seconds. From there, you can now set the portion of the video you want to trim. It's not really intuitive because you have to deal with the timing manually without any visual feedback but for simple trimmings, it'll do.

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    Using the [Add to Queue] Option, you could segment a video into smaller chunks. I cut a 4-hour video down in to 1-hour video by moving the start and stop-times up. I also manually incremented the Destination File name.
    – TheSavo
    Aug 16, 2016 at 11:38
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    How do you sett Handbrake to just "pass through" without re-encoding the clip?
    – d-b
    Dec 28, 2017 at 15:58
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    it's strange that a very highly upvoted question couldn't be answered until the OP answered it themselves
    – Ooker
    Nov 21, 2018 at 5:50
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    @d-b unfortunately, Handbrake doesn't have that option, you must use ffmepg read this stackoverflow.com/questions/28441946/… for pass through-ing a video and read this unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1670/… to split the video into your desired duration, and then join them with this stackoverflow.com/questions/7333232/…
    – Shayan
    May 7, 2019 at 14:43
  • I was confused because there is BOTH a "Range:" dropdown with default value "Chapters" (located near the top) AND a "chapters" tab further down. You want the "Range" dropdown to switch from "chapters" to "seconds"
    – K Robinson
    Jun 12, 2020 at 17:53
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I recently downloaded and installed Handbrake on my Mac. I had the same question about editing. I ripped the entire movie and saved it on my Mac. Then I used QuickTime to watch the movie, taking careful note of the section that I wanted to copy from the film. I wrote down the time of the beginning of the section, plus the time that it ended. For example, the beginning of the clip that I wanted started at 1:10:14 and ended at 1:14:54. There are 60 seconds to a minute. Just figure out the beginning of the clip in seconds (4214 seconds) and the end of the clip (4494 seconds). Enter that information and you will have your section of the movie. Give it a different title than the source movie.

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    You can just enter the start and end time as HH:mm:ss now, no need to calc seconds.
    – StingyJack
    Sep 30, 2018 at 5:18

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