[brokenmachine]

It probably is only cutting on the keyframes.

There's a flag to tell it to reencode up to and after the cuts, which would probably help a lot.

Yep - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ

>Video files cannot be cut at exact timestamps without re-encoding. yt-dlp does not re-encode the video by default, even when cutting is required. You can use --force-keyframes-at-cuts to force re-encoding; however, this process is slow - there is no way around this.

I'd probably rather just tell it to mark the sponsor segments as chapters and then skip them manually. I think it marks them by default.

[zimpenfish]

Excellent, I shall try this out, thanks