Avidemux

Infobox Software
name = Avidemux



caption = Avidemux 2.4 RC1 under Ubuntu 7.10
developer = MEAN
released = ?
frequently_updated = yes
programming language = C++
operating system = Cross-platform
language = Multilingual
genre = Video editor
license = GPL
website = [http://www.avidemux.org/ www.avidemux.org]

Avidemux is a free open-source program designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing. Downloads, documentation, and other features can be found at [http://www.avidemux.org/ avidemux.org] . It is written in C/C++, using either the GTK+ or Qt graphics toolkit or a command line interface, and is a platform independent, universal video processing program. It is available for almost all distributions of Linux that are capable of compiling C/C++, GTK+ and the SpiderMonkey ECMAScript scripting engine. A Win32 version of this program is also available for Windows users, as well as Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD ports and packages. The program has also been successfully run under Solaris, though no official packages or binaries exist for it. The program can be run in 64-bit operating systems that are non-Windows and non-Macintosh based.

Comparison

Avidemux can be compared with VirtualDub (or VirtualDubMod). While it cannot do everything that VirtualDub can, Avidemux can do things that its Windows-only counterpart cannot. It supports OGM, MP4 and Matroska files natively, direct read input for various types of MPEG files, and many other video formats and containers. It offers MPEG editing and requantization. It also has built-in subtitle handling.

Avidemux has often been considered to be an open-source substitute for high-end commercial editors, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, although it does not have as many features. Avidemux is sometimes seen to be more powerful than VirtualDub, but it has also been criticized for a poor user interface. [http://www.excelcia.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=57]

Avidemux primarily uses its GUI to perform tasks. This means that it is capable of doing many things that non-GUI users would otherwise have to do using command line tools such as MEncoder or Transcode. In the recent versions, multi-threading has been implemented for some of the video codec encoding.

Features

The straightforward user interface is designed for convenience and speed with simple operations. Features include WYSIWYG cutting, appending, filters and re-encoding into various formats. Some of the filters were ported from MPlayer and Avisynth. Avidemux can also mux and demux audio streams into and out of video files, either through re-encoding or using a direct copy mode.

An integral and important part of the design of the program is its project system, which uses the SpiderMonkey ECMAScript scripting engine. Whole projects with all options, configurations, selections, and preferences can be saved into a project file. Like VirtualDub's vcf scripting capabilities, Avidemux has advanced scripting available for it both in its GUI and command line modes. It also supports a non-project system just like VirtualDub, where you can simply create all your configurations and save the video directly without making a project file. A project queue system is also available.

Avidemux has built-in subtitle processing, both for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to soft subtitle formats (VobSub sub, ass and srt) and various hard subtitle VobSub capabilities. While it is primarily a GUI program, Avidemux can also be run from and through the command line (which can also be used for batch processing and debugging).

Multithreading

Multithreading has been implemented in the following areas of Avidemux (some partially through libavcodec):
* Encoding
** H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (using x264)
** MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (using libavcodec)
** MPEG-4 (SP/ASP, using libavcodec MPEG-4 or Xvid)
*** Xvid requires the latest version from the CVS
* Decoding
** MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (using libavcodec)
** MPEG-4 (SP/ASP, using libavcodec)

Known bugs

The MP4 files generated by avidemux (v.0.4.4) does not play well in quicktime. It is probably a problem with quicktime implementation of standard mp4 protocol. It seems that the options b-pyramid and mbaff breaks quicktime [http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/x264Options] . In any case, if it is important to play the files in this player, you can fix the mp4 using the command [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/iPodVideoEncoding] :

MP4Box -add original.mp4 fixed.mp4

Credits and information

Avidemux was written from scratch, but additional code from FFmpeg, MPlayer, Transcode, Avisynth, DVD2AVI and other projects has been used on occasion as well. Nonetheless it is a completely stand alone program that does not require any other programs to read, decode, or encode other than itself. The built-in libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project is used for decoding and encoding of various audio and video formats such as MPEG-4 ASP. The primary (though not the only) Avidemux programmer is a person known as Mean, who often frequents the [http://www.avidemux.org/admForum/ Avidemux forums] . The Avidemux project is open to user input and many suggestions from its users have already been implemented as fully-written features.

Supported input formats

File formats:
* AVI, [http://www.matrox.com/video/press/papers/odmlff2.cfm OpenDML]
* ASF
* Flash Video
* Images (BMP, JPEG, PNG)
* Matroska
* MPEG PS, TS
* [http://freshmeat.net/redir/nuppelvideo/13501/url_homepage/nuppelvideo NuppelVideo]
* OGM
* QuickTime, MP4, 3GPP

Video formats:
* Cinepak (only in latest development version)
* DV
* FFV1
* H.263
* H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
* HuffYUV
* MPEG-1, MPEG-2
* MPEG-4 Simple Profile/Advanced Simple Profile (Supported codec FourCCs: DIVX, DX50, XVID, FMP4, M4S2)
* MJPEG
* MSMPEG-4 v. 2 (FourCC DIV3)
* Raw RGB
* SVQ3
* VP3
* VP6F (through libavcodec)
* WMV 2

Audio formats:
* AAC
* AC3
* AMR narrow band
* MP3, MP2
* Vorbis
* WAV PCM
* WAV LPCM
* WMA

Supported output formats

File formats:
* AVI (single or dual audio tracks)
* Flash Video
* Images (BMP, JPEG)
* Matroska (Beta)
* MP4
* MPEG (VCD/SVCD/DVD compatible & separate)
* OGM

Video formats:
* FFV1
* H.263
* H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (using x264)
* HuffYUV
* MPEG-1, MPEG-2
* MPEG-4 (SP/ASP, using FFmpeg MPEG-4 or Xvid)
* MJPEG
* Snow

Audio formats:
* AAC
* AC3
* MP3, MP2
* Ogg Vorbis
* WAV PCM
* WAV LPCM

Versions

The current stable version of Avidemux is 2.4.3. Compared to the 2.3 and earlier versions, Avidemux 2.4 offers 3 user interfaces: GTK+, shell and Qt 4.

See also

* Avisynth
* FFmpeg
* Video editing
* VirtualDub

External links

* [http://www.avidemux.org/ Avidemux.org] (website mirrors: [http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/] , [http://avidemux.berlios.de/] [http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/] )
* [http://www.avidemux.org/admForum Avidemux Forums]
* [http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki Avidemux Wiki-Docs]