Coming home after spending vacations in some picturesque location is always painful in the beginning. We miss all those days that we spent basking the sun near the beach and try to adjust ourselves back into the daily humdrum of the city life. And on top of that is the extra task at hand of editing the pictures and videos that we made on the vacations. Sure, you can always find your way around the expensive video editor suites for adding those wonderful effects to your videos. But if you have to just trim some portion of the video and extract some other portion from it, then you can do this within seconds using the free Avidemux.
Avidemux is a free (and also open-source) software for Windows, Linux and Mac that allows you to do manipulate your video files. Although the software Avidemux name has AVI in it, but it can open many different types of the popular video formats like MPG, MP4, ASF, DVD and more. It uses a variety of codecs for decoding and encoding the video files.
The first thing that you would do with Avidemux is click on the Open File button in the toolbar and select one of the video files from your computer. You can open virtually any type of video file with Avidemux. The file is soon decoded and a preview of the first frame is displayed in the preview window. Now you can play the video file and stop it where you want to extract the video from and then click on the A button in the playback toolbar to mark the beginning of the video portion. Similarly, you have to click on the B button to mark the ending of the video portion that you want to extract.
You can also use the square brackets [ and ] to mark the beginning and the ending of the video portion. Once that is done, you may want to check the encoder options for the video and audio – or just copy it from the source as it is. You can also choose the output format of the video that is going to result from the video extraction process.
Now when you can go ahead and choose File → Save from the menubar to save the new video to anywhere on your computer. Soon a progress of the video extraction, encoding and conversion is displayed. You can pause or cancel the process of it is taking a long time, but more likely it finishes in a few seconds or minutes.
When the file is saved, you can watch the new video in any of your favorite media player (I prefer VideoLAN VLC Player myself) , upload it to Youtube or social networks.
You can download Avidemux from http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/.