6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Video
April 30th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 19 Comments
Increasingly, from blogs to marketing materials to online video show production, web workers are working with video. The good things you can do with online video go far beyond YouTube, and there are a number of free applications and utilities–many of them open source–that you can turn to to help with web video tasks. In this post, I’ll round up six of my favorites.
If you send video of any kind out on a network basis, look into Xvid. This free application compresses video files, which are often huge and unwieldy in size. I’ve gotten better than 100-to-1 compression ratios with Xvid.
Blender is not only one of the best graphics programs from the open source world, it’s one of the best open source applications of any kind. Widely used in the video and animation communities, it’s great for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and playback. You can also use it on Windows, Mac or Linux systems.
If you use a Mac, Simple Theora Encoder is a free open source application that can convert multiple files at once from several different formats, including .avi, .mov, and mp4. In keeping with the application’s name, you just hit Encode and you’re off to the races.
For simple video tasks, Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft is free, and it’s more than good enough at editing tasks to do professional-looking short videos. It comes complete with a library of slick video transitions.
MediaInfo is a free, open source application that specializes in giving you a complete taxonomy of properties for audio and video files. It has only a 1.3MB footprint–small enough that I carry a version on my pocket USB thumb drive. If you have the Windows version of MediaInfo installed, you can also add it to your right-click context menus so that you can get to the properties of a video or audio file with one mouse click.
VirtualDub is a free program for Windows users that works as a video capture and processing utility. It’s not quite as feature rich as a tool such as Adobe Premiere, but it is faster and easier to work with.
Do you know of any good, free video applications or utilities?
19 Comments Post your own comment
6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Video | White Sands Digital says: April 30th, 2008 7:50pm
[...] and utilities –many of them open source– that you can turn to to help with web video tasks.read more | digg [...]
» Enlaces en Diigo 05/01/2008 | DigiZen: Un blogfesor aprendiendo says: April 30th, 2008 11:30pm
[...] Web Worker Daily » Archive 6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Video « [...]
Zia says: May 1st, 2008 2:59am
I think it is worth mentioning 2 superb free products which are well established video tools: the powerful SUPER © and the versatile MediaCoder.
Bluefrog says: May 1st, 2008 6:26am
The first application on this list for me would have been Super - http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html - a great video and audio encoding utility with a plethora of options.
Brad Davis Seal says: May 1st, 2008 6:46am
MPEG Streamclip is a great, free, fast video player and converter for Mac and Windows. http://www.squared5.com/
Jash Sayani says: May 2nd, 2008 3:15am
I love Blender. Its a true video editing application !
Sam Shrefler says: May 2nd, 2008 7:20am
Do any of these, or are there any other DVD Producers? I’ve used Windows Movie Maker, but I have no way of getting those videos onto a Video DVD with Menu’s and Chapters
ulrich says: May 2nd, 2008 8:00am
and not to forget mplayer/mencoder. http://mplayerhq.hu
it’s not that userfriendly (in fact it’s absolutely user unfriendly), but mencoder is the most universal tool i’ve found so far.
Some Free Applications for Video « Umut’s Weblog says: May 3rd, 2008 4:07pm
[...] some stupid difficult school project about video segmantation. I needed some apps and I came across a cool post on WWD giving away some useful tips about free apps for video. Here they [...]
lo-fi librarian» Blog Archive » This Week’s Useful Tools says: May 4th, 2008 1:31am
[...] 6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working With Video - from Web Worker Daily. [...]
information now » Blog Archive says: May 4th, 2008 8:49pm
[...] ‘6 Free apps and utilities for working with video’ by Samuel Dean, Web Worker Daily, 30 April 2008 [...]
information now » Blog Archive says: May 4th, 2008 8:54pm
[...] ‘6 Free apps and utilities for working with video’ by Samuel Dean, Web Worker Daily, 30 Apr 2008 [...]
Reelix says: May 5th, 2008 12:03am
I dont know if it’s 100% relevant, but I’ve found CamStudio (camstudio.org) EXCELLENT for general Screen Recording (Not movies or games, but normal stuff, like web, notepad, showing people around your PC, etc) and the MS-CRAM Codec + WinRAR = 50MB Video Compressed to < 1MB .rar file! :D PERFECT for storage (If you need to store that type of stuff), uploading, and people with slow connections :)
- Reelix
Contact: 2r4eeli7x@gmail.com (Leaving out the 2, 4 and 7)
news.clarionlife.net » 6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Video says: May 5th, 2008 2:27am
[...] you can turn to to help with web video tasks. In this post, I’ll round up six of my favorites. Read more (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Category: General — Andrew Popoff @ 8:27 pm [...]
Negru in cerul gurii :: Hello world! :: May :: 2008 says: May 6th, 2008 1:54am
[...] a lot of good open source tools for creating, editing and working with it. Check out my list of favorites and the many excellent, free tools cited in the reader comments. I happen to work with web-based [...]
Hot Stuff @ News.ClarionLife.Net | StrategyOnline.co.za says: May 8th, 2008 2:00pm
[...] 6 Free Utilities for working with video [...]
iLibrarian » 8 Useful Collections of Open Source Apps says: June 24th, 2008 7:33am
[...] 6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Video [...]
Web Worker Daily » Archive Four More Offbeat Video Apps and Utilities « says: July 1st, 2008 4:00pm
[...] 1st, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean No Comments Recently, I did a post on video applications and utilities that can be of use to web workers. The readers weighed in with a lot of alternative selections in [...]
Ramu K C says: July 2nd, 2008 7:11am
Check out WWIGO from http://www.motvik.com to know how to convert a smartphone camera into webcam for free.