If you are in need to do video editing, Linux got you covered on multiple basis. For professional stuff there are Blender and Kdenlive, but former has a steep learning curve and later has a lot of KDE dependencies that you might not like to install if you are not using KDE. So in this article we will introduce with Avidemux. Simple video editor which will enable you to get done with most basic video editing tasks very quickly. The recent version 2.6.14 comes with lots of new features and bugfixes.
1) Installing Avidemux on Ubuntu 16.04
Lets first add getdeb repository so we have a place from where to install avidemux
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu xenial-getdeb apps" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list'
Next we have add a key for this repository, so that apt recognizes it as trusted source:
wget -q -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
Then update repository list:
sudo apt update
And at last, we install Avidemux with well know apt install command.
sudo apt install avidemux2.6-qt
That is it, we installed it, now go search for Avidemux in the lens and start it.
2) Using Avidemux to cut out parts of videos
After opening the video you want to edit, to cut parts you would need to set start and end of the chunk you want to cut out. In avidemux, start frame is set with A marker and end frame with B. If you are using avoidemux in copy mode, without encoding, make sure that B is always at I-FRM, which means keyframe. Otherwise, you will get corruption in edited video. Bellow is a picture of what we are talking about:
After you have set the A and B, you cut out that part by selecting edit-->cut in the menus, or if you don't plan on reusing that chunk somewhere else, you can go edit-->delete.
3) Appending videos
Lets say you want to join the video. You only need to append the file to your existing one and it will be joined to your video. Really simple feature.
4) Encoding the edited video
The keyframe is important if you are using copy mode. In this mode you copy the file as is, and if you cut it the chunk will remain in same format. But if you select some encoder in the output, then you don't need to worry about the keyframe. You will lose some of the quality though, and saving would last longer. So after selecting for example h.264 in Video Output, mp3 lame in audio and MP4 muxer in format, you only need to click save and encoding begins. It will last depending on size of the file and the speed of your computer. You can also do this without editing, for example if you only want to convert from one format to another. Avidemux supports pretty good share of formats, but not all.
5) Applying filters
We can apply filters by choosing Video-->Filters in the menus. There you can pick multitude of filters, such as rotate, crop, change fps. In the picture you can see applying fps resample filter
There are crop filters for making video frame smaller, as well as few other basic filters.
For rotating video in filters chose Transform and then Rotate, select angle or rotation and click ok.
To crop the video, in transform chose crop and in next window select what you want to crop by specifying how many pixels on top, bottom, left and right should be cropped. Here is the filters menu with crop and rotate selected:
And here is the output, of such action, I chose to only have terminal visible in this example
6) Extracting the audio track and muting the video
If you want to mute out the sound from the video, you can use menu option Audio --> Select Track
Here you need to uncheck all tracks, in order to have completely mute video.
If you want instead to have the track saved without the video, you need to select option that is one place below in the menus. Go to Audio --> Save Audio an chose where you want to save the audio track. Track will be saved in format you chose in the audio output section. If you are in the copy mode, it will be same as input, and if you chose the encoder then it will be encoded in chosen format.
Conclusion
Avidemux is a simple piece of software, that does good all those things that it is made to do. Cutting, joining, converting, extracting audio, those are tasks that Avidemux can do easily and quickly, and if that is all you need, you will be happy with Avidemux and you will get your job done quickly. You can get more info in official documentation, how to do few more tricks. There is a way to script and automate all those tasks, for example. This was all, for this article, thank you for reading
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