Avidemux – The Performances of A Free Video Editor Designed For Any Operating System
Commercial video editors are often expensive and provides many unneeded features for the video files processing. In the same time, free video editing software allows users to perform basic or advanced processing operations providing almost the same software performance and movies quality or even a better one as compared to similar commercial applications.
One of the many free open source video editing software is Avidemux. It is available for download as source code for Linux platform (Debian, Mandriva and Ubuntu), executable file for Windows operating system and as dmg file type for MacOS. The application allows the user to perform simple video processing tasks like cutting, filtering and encoding. It uses a wide range of codecs and supports many video files types like AVI, MPEG, ASF and others.
After you select the installation package corresponding to your operating system, the installation process is an easy to perform task ( specific guidelines are available on the Wiki documents from avidemux.org website).
During the application installation the user is able to enable or disable various features such as user interface type ( command line, GTK+, Qt4), additional languages (Catalan, French, Russian, Serbian and more), AvsProxy and sample external filter.
Notable features of this application are: optimized support for MP4 files, support for MJPEG in MOV/MP4 files, multiple common used input (AVI, OpenDML, MPEG, ASF, MP4, QuickTime) and output formats (MPEG – VCD/SVCD/DVD, AVI and others), dedicated video and audio encoders, tasks automation due to scripts implementation capability, multi-threading availability and many other useful features.
By default the GTK+ user interfaces is installed. On the main toolbar buttons for commonly performed tasks like file open and save, bitrate/size calculation and volume, are introduced for rapid user access.
The video navigation bar contains buttons that allows user to video playback options, navigate through the various movie frames, video frames selection for cutting and more. The toolbar situated in the left on the main window permits the selection the encoders (audio and video), video format and filters.
The audio and video format and corresponding encoders can be selected from drop down menus. The Format drop down menu is referring to the type of output box. The selection of output box type is determined by the type of audio and video encoders chosen in a primary phase.
From the main graphical user interface menu there are available a series of options and tools to control the settings of various file audio and video characteristics related parameters.
From the Video drop down menu the user is able to access the decoder options, postprocessing level, encoder and filters settings. In a similar manner, tasks related to the audio properties can be performed by selecting the appropriate entry of the main menu.
Program preferences window provides the opportunity to setup the user interface, various tasks automation options, input and output characteristics, audio playback and output type, video display, CPU options, multi-threading configuration and external filters.
The main advantages of this applications are: universality - reflected in the availability for commonly used operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Linux and MacOS), fast loading graphical user interface based on GTK+, the possibility of editing and processing various types of video files with a wide range of audio and video codecs.
A minor suggestion would be that on the future releases a built in help file will be more appreciated for the users, even the extensive documentation available on the wiki is more comprehensive than a help file. The application is available for free download (it is released under the GNU General Public License), at downloadtube website.
