Open-source licenses

Cut It Out is built on top of some excellent free, open-source software. This page says exactly which pieces, and gives you everything you'd need to get their source code.

If you're not a developer, there is nothing here you need to do. It's here because those projects' licenses ask us to publish it, and because you're entitled to know what's inside something you bought.

What's inside, in plain terms

FFmpeg and ffprobe read your video and write the trimmed one. Licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later.
LAME writes MP3 files. Also LGPL-2.1 or later.
openh264 encodes H.264 video. BSD-2-Clause.
Silero VAD. MIT.

We ship these unmodified and run them as separate programs; Cut It Out is not built into them and they are not built into it. The full license texts also ship inside the app, under Cut It Out → Third-party Notices… in the menu bar.

Get the source code

These are the exact archives our copies are built from. We host them ourselves, so they stay available whether or not the original projects keep their old releases up:

FFmpeg 7.1: ffmpeg-7.1.tar.xz (also at ffmpeg.org)
LAME 3.100: lame-3.100.tar.gz (also at SourceForge)
openh264 2.4.1: v2.4.1 (BSD-2-Clause, from Cisco's repository)

Prefer it another way? Email [email protected] and we'll send you the source directly.

For developers

The rest of this page is the technical detail the LGPL asks us to publish: how our copy of FFmpeg was built, and how you'd rebuild or replace it. Safe to ignore otherwise.

How our copy of FFmpeg was built

A program like FFmpeg can be built in many different configurations, and the choice changes which license applies to the result. Ours is built with the options below and no others. What matters in that list is what's missing: --enable-gpl and --enable-nonfree are both absent, which is what keeps our build under the LGPL rather than the stricter GPL. You can check this yourself on the copy you received by running ffmpeg -L.

macOS (arm64) build:

--prefix=$PREFIX
--pkg-config-flags=--static
--extra-cflags=-I$PREFIX/include
--extra-ldflags=-L$PREFIX/lib
--enable-static
--disable-shared
--enable-libopenh264
--enable-libmp3lame
--enable-videotoolbox
--enable-audiotoolbox
--disable-doc
--disable-debug
--disable-ffplay
--disable-network
--disable-protocol=rtmp
--disable-protocol=rtp
--disable-autodetect

Note the absence of --enable-gpl, --enable-nonfree, --enable-libx264 and --enable-libx265.

Rebuilding it, or swapping in your own

The LGPL gives you the right to replace the FFmpeg inside a program you own with your own build of it. Here that's straightforward, because we call FFmpeg as an ordinary separate program rather than compiling it in.

Our build script (build_ffmpeg_lgpl.sh) fetches the sources above, applies no patches, and configures with exactly the options listed. To use your own build, replace the binaries inside the application bundle at Contents/Resources/backend/bin/. Cut It Out calls them by path, so a drop-in replacement works.

The license texts

GNU LGPL v2.1: FFmpeg, LAME
BSD-2-Clause: openh264

The full texts also ship inside the app bundle (backend/licenses/) and are readable from Cut It Out → Third-party Notices… in the app menu.