Avidemux
Encyclopedia
Avidemux is a free and open-source video editing program
Video editing software
Video editing software, is application software which handles the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a computer non-linear editing systems...

 designed for video editing and video processing
Video processing
In electrical engineering and computer science, video processing is a particular case of signal processing, which often employs video filters and where the input and output signals are video files or video streams. Video processing techniques are used in television sets, VCRs, DVDs, video codecs,...

. It is written in C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, and uses either the GTK+
GTK+
GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...

 or Qt.

Features

Avidemux is capable of non-linear video editing
Non-linear editing system
In video, a non-linear editing system is a video editing or audio editing digital audio workstation system which can perform random access non-destructive editing on the source material...

, applying visual effects (called “Filters” by Avidemux) to video, and transcoding video into various formats. Some of the filters were ported
Porting
In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...

 from MPlayer
MPlayer
MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...

 and Avisynth
AviSynth
AviSynth is a frameserver program for Microsoft Windows developed by Ben Rudiak-Gould, Edwin van Eggelen, Klaus Post, Richard Berg, Ian Brabham and others. It is free software under GNU GPL license.-Scripting video editor:...

. Avidemux can also insert audio streams into a video file (an action known as multiplexing
Multiplexing
The multiplexed signal is transmitted over a communication channel, which may be a physical transmission medium. The multiplexing divides the capacity of the low-level communication channel into several higher-level logical channels, one for each message signal or data stream to be transferred...

 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
VirtualDub
VirtualDub is a video capture and video processing utility for Microsoft Windows written by Avery Lee.It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression...

's VCF scripting capabilities, Avidemux has advanced scripting available for it both in its GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

 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
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 of DVD subtitles and for rendering hard subtitle. Avidemux supports various subtitle formats, including MicroDVD
MicroDVD
MicroDVD is a subtitle file format for digital video. Its name is derived from a media player application designed to play DVD videos along with subtitles, originally developed by Tiamat Software. The application was first released in 2000 but development ended in 2001...

 (.SUB), SubStation Alpha
SubStation Alpha
SubStation Alpha , abbreviated SSA, is a subtitle file format created by CS Low that allows for more advanced subtitles than the conventional SRT and similar formats. This format can be rendered with VSFilter in conjunction with a DirectShow-aware video player , or MPlayer with the SSA/ASS library...

 (.SSA), Advanced SubStation Alpha (.ASS) and SubRip
SubRip
SubRip is a software program for Windows which "rips" subtitles and their timings from video. It is free software, released under the GNU GPL...

 (.SRT).

While it is primarily a GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

 program, Avidemux can also be run from the command line.

Components

Avidemux was written from scratch, but additional code from FFmpeg
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...

, MPlayer
MPlayer
MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...

, Transcode
Transcode (software)
Transcode is a free audio/video transcoder with a command-line interface for Unix-like operating systems. It uses FFmpeg's libavcodec library, and supports numerous formats . It also includes a variety of pre/post filters for denoising, deinterlacing, smoothing, sharpening, etc...

 and Avisynth
AviSynth
AviSynth is a frameserver program for Microsoft Windows developed by Ben Rudiak-Gould, Edwin van Eggelen, Klaus Post, Richard Berg, Ian Brabham and others. It is free software under GNU GPL license.-Scripting video editor:...

 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. 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
      H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
      H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...

       (using x264
      X264
      x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.-History:...

      )
    • MPEG-1
      MPEG-1
      MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to 1.5 Mbit/s without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting possible.Today, MPEG-1 has become...

       and MPEG-2
      MPEG-2
      MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...

       (using libavcodec
      Libavcodec
      libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. Same name but incompatible libraries are provided from both FFmpeg project and Libav project....

      )
    • MPEG-4 Part 2
      MPEG-4 Part 2
      MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2...

       (SP/ASP, using libavcodec or Xvid
      XviD
      Xvid is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile . It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices.Xvid is a...

      )
      • 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

The current stable version of Avidemux is 2.5.3. Compared to the 2.3 and earlier versions, Avidemux 2.4 offers 3 user interfaces: GTK+
GTK+
GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...

, shell and Qt
Qt (toolkit)
Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface , and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers...

 4.

Avidemux is available for almost all distributions of Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 that are capable of compiling C++, GTK+ and the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. A Win32 version of this program is also available for Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 users, as well as Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

, NetBSD
NetBSD
NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...

 and OpenBSD
OpenBSD
OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...

 ports and packages.

Supported formats

Avidemux supports the following file formats:
Multimedia container formats
Name File extension As input As output
Audio Video Interleave
Audio Video Interleave
Audio Video Interleave , known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback...

 
.AVI
Advanced Systems Format
Advanced Systems Format
Advanced Systems Format is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media...

 
.ASF, .WMV and .WMA
Flash Video  .FLV
Matroska
Matroska
The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks in one file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows...

 
.MKV
MPEG elementary stream
Elementary stream
An elementary stream as defined by MPEG communication protocol is usually the output of an audio or video encoder. ES contains only one kind of data, e.g. audio, video or closed caption. An elementary stream is often referred to as "elementary", "data", "audio", or "video" bitstreams or streams...

 
MPEG program stream  .MPG and .MPEG Can create files that are compatible with Video CD
Video CD
Before the advent of DVD and Blu-ray, the Video CD became the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm optical discs. The format is a standard digital format for storing video on a Compact Disc...

, SVCD or DVD Video
MPEG transport stream  .TS
MPEG-4 Part 14
MPEG-4 Part 14
MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital video and digital audio streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images...

 
.MP4
NuppelVideo .NUV
OGM  .OGM
QuickTime
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

 
.MOV
3GP  .3GP

Image formats
Name File extension As input As output
Windows bitmap
Windows bitmap
The BMP File Format, also known as Bitmap Image File or Device Independent Bitmap file format or simply a Bitmap, is a Raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device , especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems.The BMP...

 
.BMP
JPEG
JPEG
In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

 
.JPG and .JPEG

Video formats
Name As Input As Output
Cinepak
Cinepak
Cinepak is a video codec developed by Peter Barrett at SuperMac Technologies, and released in 1991 with the Video Spigot, and then in 1992 as part of Apple Computer's QuickTime video suite. It was designed to encode 320x240 resolution video at 1x CD-ROM transfer rates. The codec was ported to the...

 
DV
DV
DV is a format for the digital recording and playing back of digital video. The DV codec was launched in 1995 with joint efforts of leading producers of video camcorders....

 
FFV1
FFV1
FFV1, which stands for "FF video codec 1", is a lossless intra-frame video codec. It can use either variable length coding or arithmetic coding for entropy coding...

 
H.263
H.263
H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bitrate compressed format for videoconferencing. It was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group in a project ending in 1995/1996 as one member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.H.263...

 
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...

 
Using x264
X264
x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.-History:...

HuffYUV
Huffyuv
Huffyuv is a lossless video codec created by Ben Rudiak-Gould which is meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format.Despite the "YUV" in the name, it does not compress the YUV color space, but YCbCr...

 
MPEG-1
MPEG-1
MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to 1.5 Mbit/s without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting possible.Today, MPEG-1 has become...

 
MPEG-2
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...

 
MPEG-4 Part 2
MPEG-4 Part 2
MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2...

Both Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile
Supported codec FourCC
FourCC
A FourCC is a sequence of four bytes used to uniquely identify data formats.The concept originated in the OSType scheme used in the Macintosh system software and was adopted for the Amiga/Electronic Arts Interchange File Format and derivatives...

s: DIVX, DX50, XVID, FMP4, M4S2
Using FFmpeg
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...

 or Xvid
XviD
Xvid is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile . It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices.Xvid is a...

Motion JPEG 
MSMPEG-4 v2FourCC: DIV3
Raw video – RGB 
Raw video – YV12 
Snow
Sorenson Video 3 (SVQ3)
Sorenson codec
Sorenson codec may refer to either of three proprietary video codecs: Sorenson Video, Sorenson Video 3 or Sorenson Spark. Sorenson Video is also known as Sorenson Video Codec, Sorenson Video Quantizer or SVQ...

 
VC-1
VC-1
VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...

FourCC: WMV3
VP3
VP3
On2 TrueMotion VP3 is a lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies....

 
VP6
VP6
On2 TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. This codec is commonly used by Adobe Flash, Flash Video, and JavaFX media files.- Overview :The VP6 codec...

 
Through libavcodec
Libavcodec
libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. Same name but incompatible libraries are provided from both FFmpeg project and Libav project....

Windows Media Video 8
Windows Media Video
'Windows Media Video is a video compression format for several proprietary codecs developed by Microsoft. The original video format, known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. The other formats, such as WMV Screen and WMV Image, cater...

FourCC: WMV2
Y800

Audio formats
Name As Input As Output
Adaptive Multi-Rate – Narrow Band (AMR-NB)
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....

 (AAC)
AC-3
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. It was originally called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994. Except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints...

 
DTS 
Linear pulse code modulation (LPCM)
MP2
MPEG-1 Audio Layer II
MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or MPEG-2 Audio Layer II is a lossy audio compression format defined by ISO/IEC 11172-3 alongside MPEG-1 Audio Layer I and MPEG-1 Audio Layer III...

 
MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 
Pulse-code modulation
Pulse-code modulation
Pulse-code modulation is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form for digital audio in computers and various Blu-ray, Compact Disc and DVD formats, as well as other uses such as digital telephone systems...

 (PCM)
Vorbis
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...

 

Comparison

Avidemux can be compared with VirtualDub
VirtualDub
VirtualDub is a video capture and video processing utility for Microsoft Windows written by Avery Lee.It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression...

 or VirtualDubMod
VirtualDubMod
VirtualDubMod is an open source video capture and linear processing tool for Microsoft Windows. It is based on Avery Lee's VirtualDub, and is licensed under the GPL. VirtualDubMod is hosted on SourceForge and is at version 1.5.10.2 ....

. 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
Thread (computer science)
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest unit of processing that can be scheduled by an operating system. The implementation of threads and processes differs from one operating system to another, but in most cases, a thread is contained inside a process...

 features and native support for x86-64
X86-64
x86-64 is an extension of the x86 instruction set. It supports vastly larger virtual and physical address spaces than are possible on x86, thereby allowing programmers to conveniently work with much larger data sets. x86-64 also provides 64-bit general purpose registers and numerous other...

, 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
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

 users would otherwise have to do using command line tools such as MEncoder
MEncoder
MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. It is a close sibling to MPlayer and can convert all the formats that MPlayer understands into a variety of compressed and uncompressed formats using different codecs.MEncoder...

 or Transcode
Transcode (software)
Transcode is a free audio/video transcoder with a command-line interface for Unix-like operating systems. It uses FFmpeg's libavcodec library, and supports numerous formats . It also includes a variety of pre/post filters for denoising, deinterlacing, smoothing, sharpening, etc...

.

See also

  • List of video editing software
  • Comparison of free video converters
    Comparison of free video converters
    Video converters are programs for converting files between different formats. Below is a comparison for four freeware video converters in the field of supported input files, supported output files, features, user interface, ready-made presets, technical help/support, tutorials and supported...

  • Non-linear editing system
    Non-linear editing system
    In video, a non-linear editing system is a video editing or audio editing digital audio workstation system which can perform random access non-destructive editing on the source material...

  • FFmpeg
    FFmpeg
    FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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