Geeky Fun: GNU/Linux Video Editor Roundup.
I’ve spent the last four days trying to figure out how to crunch a 250MB AVI file down into something more cross-platform friendly (the JaK Attack! #5). My mission was to either get it under 100MB so I could post it on You Tube, or get it into a more common format like MPEG or MOV. I think I went through every GNU/Linux video editor out there in the process, but in the end I had to use Windows Movie Maker to do the crunch for me (sigh - I chalk this one up on the ‘loss’ board). Even though I wasn’t able to get any of the FLOSS tools working for me, I thought that it might be a good idea to create a list of all the tools I tried in case anyone else is going down the same road as me.
A quick disclaimer: The reason why I couldn’t get any of these tools working for me is due to my inexperience in the whole video-editing world, not because they are broken or unsuitable. I am not criticizing these tools.
Video Editing Tools for GNU/Linux
Kino
Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.
LiVES
LiVES began in 2002 as the Linux Video Editing System. Since it now runs on more operating systems, LiVES is a Video Editing System. It is designed to be simple to use, yet powerful. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features.
Mencoder (link to Gentoo HOWTO)
This howto intends to introduce to you some of the simple commands to use MPlayer’s MEncoder program to convert files from one format to another.
This is not meant to be an advanced or exhaustive guide. For in-depth details see man mencoder or the official documentation:
Transcode
Transcode is a suite of command line utilities for transcoding video and audio codecs, and for converting beween different container formats. Transcode can decode and encode many audio and video formats
Ffmpeg
Avidemux
Avidemux is very GUI oriented, because according to the original and primary programmer, when doing video tasks you need to see what you are doing. There is however a drawback that it requires a user presence.
The ultimate goal of Avidemux is to provide a nice GUI to help set up your processing task, and then save that job. After that, run Avidemux on these jobs and go watch a movie, take a nap, go have lunch.
PiTiVi
PiTiVi allows users to easily edit audio/video projects based on the GStreamer framework: Capture audio and video; mix, resize, cut, apply effects to audio/video sources; Render/Save the projects to any format supported by the GStreamer framework. PiTiVi is still in a very early stage of development, and contributions are much welcome.
I’m sure I missed some very worthwhile projects. Feel free to contribute in the comments.
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1 opinion for Geeky Fun: GNU/Linux Video Editor Roundup.
video news
Apr 7, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Have you ever been to ‘you tube’? they let you host videos there and you can hotlink them on your blogs. it’s really cool and you don’t have to bandwidth on the videos, cause its free.
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