Avidemux

This section may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (June 2009)

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (July 2009)

Avidemux

Avidemux v2.5.2 (Qt interface) on Kubuntu 10.04
Developer(s)	“Mean”, “Gruntster” and “Fahr”[1]
Stable release	For Windows: v2.5.6  (December 31, 2011; 4 months ago (2011-12-31)[2]) For Mac OS X: v2.5.4  (October 25, 2010; 18 months ago (2010-10-25)[2]) For Linux: v2.5.6  (December 31, 2011; 4 months ago (2011-12-31)[2]) [±]
Preview release	Windows: v2.6 (7719)  (December 30, 2011; 4 months ago (2011-12-30)[3]) Mac OS X: v2.6.0 (6538)  (August 28, 2010; 20 months ago (2010-August-28)[4]) [±]
Written in	C++
Operating system	Microsoft Windows Mac OS X Linux BSD
Platform	IA-32 and x64
Available in	English, Czech, French, Italian and German
Type	Video editing software
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.avidemux.org

Avidemux is a free and open-source video editing program designed for video editing and video processing. It is written in C++, and uses either the GTK+ or Qt.

Features

Avidemux is capable of non-linear video editing, applying visual effects (called “Filters” by Avidemux) to video, and transcoding video into various formats. Some of the filters were ported from MPlayer and Avisynth. Avidemux can also insert audio streams into a video file (an action known as multiplexing or “muxing”) or extract audio streams from video files (an action known as “demuxing”).

An integral and important part of the design of the program is its project system, which uses the SpiderMonkey JavaScript 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 users can simply create all of their 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 of DVD subtitles and for rendering hard subtitle. Avidemux supports various subtitle formats, including MicroDVD (.SUB), SubStation Alpha (.SSA), Advanced SubStation Alpha (.ASS) and SubRip (.SRT).

While it is primarily a GUI program, Avidemux can also be run from the command line.

Components

Avidemux was written from scratch, but additional code from FFmpeg, MPlayer, Transcode and Avisynth has been used on occasion as well. Nonetheless it is a completely standalone 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 Avidemux.^[5] The Avidemux project is open to user input and many suggestions from its users have already been implemented as fully written features.

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 and MPEG-2 (using libavcodec)
  • MPEG-4 Part 2 (SP/ASP, using libavcodec or Xvid)
    • Xvid requires the latest version from the CVS
• Decoding
  • MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 (using libavcodec)
  • MPEG-4 Part 2 (SP/ASP, using libavcodec)

Versions and ports

Avidemux is available for almost all distributions of Linux that are capable of compiling C++, GTK+ and the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. A Win32 version of this program is also available for Microsoft Windows users, as well as Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD ports and packages.^[6][7][8] Starting with version 2.4, Avidemux offers a command-line interface and two graphical ones: One based on GTK+ and another based on Qt 4.

Supported formats

Avidemux supports the following file formats:

Comparison

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

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 has native support for OGM, MP4 and Matroska files, 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's features and functions are comparable to VirtualDub, but it has also been criticized for a poor user interface. Due to Avidemux's multithreading features and native support for x86-64, it was capable of outperforming VirtualDub in certain respects for several years.

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.

See also

Free software portal

• List of video editing software
• Comparison of free video converters
• Non-linear editing system
• FFmpeg

Notes

References

Further reading

• Rankin, Kyle (2006). Linux Multimedia Hacks. O'Reilly Media, Inc. pp. 189–190, 221–222. ISBN 978-0-596-10076-6. 
• Montabone, Sebastian (2010). "Chapter 10: Movie Editing". Beginning Digital Image Processing: Using Free Tools for Photographers. Apress. pp. 235–253. ISBN 978-1-4302-2841-7. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Avidemux

• Official website