Linux Multimedia Hacks

Edit Video

Cut and edit video from a number of formats with avidemux.

Like with other multimedia editing, video-editing tools usually fall into either the consumer or the professional user category. There are a number of video-editing tools under Linux, both command line or graphical, and consumer or professional.This hacks covers avidemux, a video-editing tool that is aimed at the consumer level and has plenty of features. I describe how to use this tool to perform basic video editing.

The first step is to download and install the avidemux software. This step varies based on your distribution, but visit the avidemux download page at http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/download.html and find the precompiled package for your distribution. If there is no precompiled version, then download the .tar.gz source from the site and follow the installation documentation at http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/doc/en/install.xml.html to install the software.

There are very few required libraries for avidemux: it requires GTK+ and glib2.x, libmad, libxml2, and nasm—all software that should be readily available on any major Linux distribution. Apart from that, other libraries are optional and only serve to increase avidemux’s support for various video and audio formats. [Hack #53] explains how to find and install various extra codecs and libraries for your computer.

Once avidemux is installed, launch it from a menu or type avidemux from a console. The default interface has a lot of widgets, but for ...