I often want to cut or split videos, but without having to recode them.

I wouldn't mind if I had to snap to i-frames or if the program screws with the header information/timecode or whatever might throw off a program like Windows Media Player, as long as VLC can play it.
And Rockz, I don't want to hear anything about Hex-editing.

I saw that Virtual Dub is recommended in the sticky, but I wanted to make sure it won't try to recode and wanted to know about alternatives.

There's Wax, I dunno if you want freebies or not. But it's probably too much for simple video cutting and splitting.

What do you mean by recode? You mean when it exports your edited video it changes things around compared to the original video?

Well, you can just open up the video in a hex editor...

jk. I really don't know if you can do that. MP3s tend to work fine if you cut the last half it off, so I would assume videos would too, but I don't think so, due to the interleave.

Afaik, you can't just losslessly edit video. If you make any changes, you'll have to re-encode it. Some tend to re-encode better than others. I'm no expert on video, but I do know I have a terrible time getting h264 to work with virtualdub. From my experience there's only a few things that it works with.

Wax always recodes (re-encodes) the movies.
What I want is a program which keeps the stream intact, and only saves it as a new file, which is much faster than creating the movie anew (recode).

As rockz pointed out, whenever I apply a filter (e.g. sharpening, add text or w/e) I have to recode (technical reasons) but this is not necessary (technically) when I cut/split at so called key frames/i-frames which contain information for the whole frame instead of using the previous frame and only saving the changes.

This is possible (whoever used eMule/Torrent and previewed the file before it's finished loading knows what I mean) but I'm hoping someone already has experience with this and can recommend a good program, so I don't have to try out a buttload of shareware junk.

I finally got around to test it. And virtual does it. Cut/split without re-encode. All you have to do is tick video -> direct stream copy.
And yes, it can be a hassle to load videos into it. But eventually I found a codec pack that does it for x64 windows.

Just thought I'd mention that incase someone else has that question too.