In case you need to do some very basic video editing and encoding you'll definitely need a simple piece of software and perhaps a fast one. For the purpose of cutting, resizing and cropping a video file I've chosen Avidemux today. Was I satisfied with its performances? Well, let's see.

First of all, you should know what I wanted from the software. I wanted to take some video files and convert them to a resolution of approximately 640x240, to reduce the framerate to about 24 fps and to compress the files to a format that is playable by a 200MHz ARM processor.

After playing a little with the program, I managed to do all these things. The software has a lot of nice features, but not the very intuitive interface I was expecting. However, Avidemux2 is a popular interface and it has versions available for all the common operating systems.

Installing it may present some problems at satisfying dependencies, but after the requirements are met you know that most of the functionality will be available so I guess it's not such a bad thing. Dependencies mostly require some libraries for encoding and Avidemux2 uses some of the best available out there. The main video codec used by Avidemux is LavCodec and this is a good thing because this is fast and the output is pretty good. Actually, Avidemux gets most of its functionality from LavCodec.

The Interface

The interface of this software is pretty intuitive, but I feel that a newbie wouldn't handle it very well. It has 3 toolbars that can be moved and a central area where you can see the movie.

The toolbar located in the upper part of the interface is used to do some basic actions like opening a movie and saving it. Other buttons can display some info about the video file and can also show the output of what's about to be displayed. The info function is good, but the output function is not that great. It doesn't show the effects of the compression, it only shows how filters will modify the movie. The output function works when playing the movie and the preview function is useful when the movie is stopped.

In the left side of the video you have the toolbar for setting what codec is used for video and which one is used for audio. For both video and audio you can configure different settings related to the codec. One of the best things about this software is the video filters function. You can use several filters in the same time and the list of filters is very comprehensive. These filters are great and they can do a lot of things. A small bug is present here but it will not be very annoying. If you want to get a file to a certain size, you should know that a very useful bitrate calculator is available. Don't forget to press the V Process and the A Process buttons if you want any results. If you don't press them, the software doesn't encode.

Under the video you have the toolbar for playback. The controls are a little more advanced than what you have on the average player and this is how they should be. From this toolbar you can select a start point and a stop one for your video file.


The Good

After getting used to it, this software can do a really good job without too much hassle. Getting used to it is pretty straight forward and doing one encoding should be enough.

The Bad

The interface is not very well optimized; the output is not as good as I was expecting from this type of application.

The Truth

Until I'll find something better I will count on Avidemux2 to encode my video files. It's the right application when very complex tasks aren't required.


Check out some screenshots below: