<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a class="snap_shots" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/2480473606/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2401/2480473606_19ce66a701_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0);"></a> <br>
<span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a class="snap_shots" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/2480473606/">Avidemux - 2.4.1 sample screenshot</a> <br> Originally uploaded by <a class="snap_shots" href="http://www.flickr.com/people/plakboek/">plakboek</a> </span></div>
On
the <a href="http://www.theopendisc.com/education/">Open Education Disk</a> was a copy of open-source software for
video editing called <a href="http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/">Avidemux</a>. To date I have used the Windows based
VirtualDub so I was curious about this software that has been ported
across to Windows from Linux. Hard core video coders might be
interested to read this <a class="snap_shots" href="http://www.excelcia.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=57">detailed Excelcia review</a> that compares both packages. Think of these more as power tools for splicing, trimming and
converting videos, not something to edit and mix tracks to make movies.<br><br>It
only took me a few min to download and install this onto Windows XP
from SourceForge. Of course Ubuntu Linux users have an easier approach
by just automatically installing this from available repositories. From
what I can see, it comes jam packed with all the codecs you will
probably ever need. <br><br>I was able to quickly use it to open an MOV file, recode, crop and trim it into a crisp smaller <a href="http://plakboek.livejournal.com/tag/mp4">MP4 video </a>version
that I could send by eMail or upload to Moodle for my students to play
on their portable players or iPods. In another couple of minutes, I was
also able to create a SWF or FLV version.<br> <br>Cross-platform
applications that run on Linux, OSX and Windows are a preferred option
for us so we will probably add this powerful <a href="http://plakboek.livejournal.com/tag/floss">FLOSS tool</a> on our school network, adding it to the next base computer images for Windows and Ubuntu at our college.<br clear="all">
<br>-- <br>Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College<br><a href="http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au">http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au</a><br><br>"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead