Avidemux is a free open-source program designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing, which can be used on almost all known operating systems and computer platforms. Avidemux is my personal favorite because of its simplicity yet wide range of tools. Avidemux lets you do just about everything under the sun. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.

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.