How to use
AVIDEMUX

The open source video

How to use

Kayo de Bellis

Realitas Ltd

 
 
 
How to use Avidemux ® 
Published by 
Realitas Ltd 
London – United Kingdom 
www.realitas.co.uk 
Copyright © 2016 by Realitas Ltd, London 
 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any 
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www.realitas.co.uk 
 
Trademarks: Realitas 
 
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read.  

ISBN: 978‐0‐9935655‐0‐2 
 
 
Printed in the United Kingdom 

I would like to dedicate this book to my lovely wife Rita — it’s

 
 
Contents
About the Author ................................................................................................................................ 8
Preface ................................................................................................................................................ 9
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 9
Acknowledgements............................................................................................................................. 9
Chapter 1 VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE ............................................................................................... 10
Avidemux .......................................................................................................................................... 10
Installation ........................................................................................................................................ 10
User Interface ................................................................................................................................... 16
Main Window – QT Version .......................................................................................................... 16
Main Toolbar ................................................................................................................................. 17
Navigation Bar ............................................................................................................................... 18
Audio/ Video Side Bar ................................................................................................................... 19
Avidemux Menu ................................................................................................................................ 20
System Menu (Windows platform) ................................................................................................... 21
System Menu ................................................................................................................................ 21
Avidemux Auto Menus...................................................................................................................... 21
Recent Menu ..................................................................................................................................... 25
Zoom Menu ....................................................................................................................................... 27
Go Menu ........................................................................................................................................... 29
Help Menu ........................................................................................................................................ 30
Chapter 2 Quickstart .......................................................................................................................... 35
Multimedia files Characteristics Basic Terms ................................................................................... 35
Container Format .............................................................................................................................. 35
Video format ..................................................................................................................................... 36
Encoder ............................................................................................................................................. 36
Video Output encoders ..................................................................................................................... 37
Audio Output encoders..................................................................................................................... 37
Decoder ............................................................................................................................................. 38
Avidemux support Input file formats ................................................................................................ 38
Avidemux supported output file formats ......................................................................................... 39
Inbuilt video decoders in AVIDEMUX................................................................................................ 41

3
 Audio encoders ................................................................................................................................. 42
Inbuilt audio decoders in AVIDEMUX ............................................................................................... 43
Multi-audio files or Multi soundtracks ............................................................................................. 43
AVI ................................................................................................................................................. 44
MPEG files ..................................................................................................................................... 46
Opening Files..................................................................................................................................... 46
Cutting Video Files ............................................................................................................................ 48
Audio/video sync .......................................................................................................................... 48
Markers ............................................................................................................................................. 50
Saving a video section ....................................................................................................................... 53
Cutting a video section ..................................................................................................................... 54
Advanced cutting .............................................................................................................................. 55
Auto-split....................................................................................................................................... 55
External audio source ....................................................................................................................... 56
Intra frames and Smart Copy ............................................................................................................ 57
Copy/paste ........................................................................................................................................ 60
Encoding............................................................................................................................................ 60
The copy mode.................................................................................................................................. 61
Encoding mode ................................................................................................................................. 62
Screenshot an individual frame as jpg or bmp ................................................................................. 62
Chapter 3 Filtering ............................................................................................................................. 64
Video filters ....................................................................................................................................... 64
Meta filters........................................................................................................................................ 66
Chapter 4 - Transform a video .............................................................................................................. 67
Add Borders to a video ..................................................................................................................... 67
Add a Logo to a video file.................................................................................................................. 76
Transparency for the logo ................................................................................................................. 79
Add Blacken Boarders around the video file .................................................................................... 81
Speeds up or Slow down a video (Used for Converting between Pal and NTSC formats) ............... 85
How to Crop Videos .......................................................................................................................... 92
How can we fade a video “In” and “Out.” ........................................................................................ 98
How to Remove colour from a video (the Gray Scale Filter) .......................................................... 104
How to Mirror a video - Horizontal flip or the Mirror Filter ........................................................... 110
How to Synchronize a video (Converting between Pal and NTSC formats).................................... 115

4
 How to Rotate a video .................................................................................................................... 120
How to Change the Aspect Ratio of a Video - SWS Resize.............................................................. 124
1) Lanzcos3 .................................................................................................................................. 126
2) Bilinear .................................................................................................................................... 126
3) Bi-cubic.................................................................................................................................... 127
How to vertically flip a video (Change the video upside and down) - Vertical Flip ........................ 131
Chapter 5 - De-Interlacing a video with the Meta group filters ......................................................... 136
Decomb Decimate method ............................................................................................................. 137
Choosing the Decomb Decimate Modes: ....................................................................................... 140
Dgbob Method ................................................................................................................................ 145
Donald Graft Bob Filter ................................................................................................................... 145
Horizontal Stack Fields methodology ............................................................................................. 153
Kernel Deint Method ...................................................................................................................... 157
The Kernel Deint configuration filter elements .............................................................................. 159
Libavdec Deinterlacers .................................................................................................................... 165
Merge Fields filter ........................................................................................................................... 171
Separate Fields method .................................................................................................................. 175
Stack Fields method ........................................................................................................................ 179
Un-stack Fields method .................................................................................................................. 183
Yadif method................................................................................................................................... 187
Configuration .................................................................................................................................. 189
 Mode: .................................................................................................................................. 189
 The "Order" option: ............................................................................................................ 190
Chapter 6 - How to edit and change the Colours of a Video .............................................................. 193
How to Utilize the YUV management method to change the colour of a video - Avisynth colour
filter ................................................................................................................................................. 193
How to fix the Chroma Shift of a video or as some call "colour Ghosting. ..................................... 198
How to Adjust the Contrast, Brightness and colours of a Video .................................................... 204
How to Remove the Colour of a video using a Grey Scale filter ..................................................... 208
Adjust the Contrast, Brightness, saturation and gamma of a video using the Mplayer eq2 filter . 212
How to Adjust just the Saturation of a video using the Mplayer Hue filter ................................... 216
How to Remove Y, U or V plane with the Remove Plane filter ....................................................... 221
How to Swap the U and V by using the Swap UV filters ................................................................. 226
Chapter 7 - Removing the Noise and making the video image smoother .......................................... 230

5
 How to Smooth and cut the noise of a video using the Flux Smooth filter .................................... 230
Using the Gaussian convolution filter to blur a litter bit the video file quality image.................... 235
Large Median (5x5) filter................................................................................................................. 238
Median convolution filter ............................................................................................................... 242
How to reduce the image of a video making it almost still using the Mplayer De-noise 3 D filter 245
Mplayer De-noise 3D HQ filter........................................................................................................ 248
Chapter 8 - Sharpness a video quality image and removing a logo from a video image.................... 251
How to sharpen a video by using “Asharp” filter............................................................................ 251
How to Remove a Logo from a TV station on a video by using the Mplayer delogo ...................... 255
How to sharpen the edge of the video image by using the Msharpen filter .................................. 259
Sharpen convolution filter .............................................................................................................. 262
Chapter 9 - How to Add Subtitles to a video ...................................................................................... 266
How to add Subtitles by using the SSA subtitle filter ..................................................................... 266
Subtitles filters for Avidemux version 2.5.6 .................................................................................... 269
Adding subtitles to a video by using Vobsub filter ......................................................................... 270
Using DVB sub filter for subtitles .................................................................................................... 273
Subtitler (SRT) ................................................................................................................................. 276
OpenGL ........................................................................................................................................... 280
Miscellaneous ................................................................................................................................. 281
Chapter 10 - Audio Filters ................................................................................................................... 282
Copy mode ...................................................................................................................................... 282
Process mode .................................................................................................................................. 282
Changing Frame Rate of a video - PAL to Film and Film to PAL ...................................................... 283
Chapter 11 - Removing, converting or extracting Audio from a Video .............................................. 286
Extracting and saving the audio from a video file........................................................................... 286
Delete audio from a video file ........................................................................................................ 287
Extracting and converting the audio from FLV and mp4 video to MP3 audio file.......................... 289
Chapter 12 - Convert DVD video to AVI .............................................................................................. 291
Video Size and Aspect ratio before conversion .............................................................................. 293
Chapter 13 - Convert AVI video to DVD .............................................................................................. 295
Preparation before we convert it ................................................................................................... 296
Chapter 14 - How to join several Video files into one video file ........................................................ 300
Appendix ............................................................................................................................................. 305
Shortcuts in AVIDEMUX .................................................................................................................. 305

6
7
About the Author

Kayo de Bellis is an IT System Administrator at a Training and Development Company based in the
United Kingdom. He has more than 20 years of experience designing, deploying and administering IT
infrastructure in a wide range of organizations around the World and in São Paulo, New York,
London and Paris.

Kayo has been involved in giving IT support and consulting to Trading Companies, Financial
Institutions and institutions linked to the stock market. With a degree in Business administration and
Foreign Trade and a BTEC in Computer Science, fluent in English, Portuguese and French he has
developed an IT view in a multi-National environment. He also has been involved with various
extracurricular activities such as writing documentation for IT training courses and Guides in IT and
other fields like popular Science.

Kayo also has a Military formation background where he also developed some IT skills and a passion
for Cryptography and electrical engineering.

Kayo is very passionate about his community. He’s been contributing with some charity institutions
and the Red Cross to give support for homeless in Brazil and United Kingdom distributing food and
resources to these communities on the street.

He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

8
Preface

Introduction

This book is intended for anyone who is interest in using an easy open source video editing software
in a windows environment and do not have any previous knowledge in video editing and media.

Presented in a simple visual layout “How to use Avidemux” is a book where the reader will be guided
with practical video editing samples making something that could be a complex and a pain process
just a matter of “following the steps”.

Instead of making a very technical and theoretical video editing work the book was divided
according to the AVIDEMUX interface layout we can find when we use the software in a windows
system environment.

If the user follows the Avidemux menus and options the user will be following the book contents.

This makes this book a quick and easy guide for those who wants to understand and work with a free
open source media software without having to spend a lot of money and resources in order to
achieve very good and advance results in video editing.

I hope you enjoy this piece of work and that it helps anyone who wants to develop skills towards
video editing.

Acknowledgements

There are no coincidences. Even something as simple as a small book, a writing work that was not
considered important enough to be created, takes a great amount of effort to bring it forward to
reality. A great proportion of this effort comes from people who do not share in the opportunity to
have their names on the cover. The author owes a great debt of gratitude to these people, and
without their contribution this work would not be possible to be concluded.

9
Add a Logo to a video file

This filter puts a log on top of the video, with alpha blending.

In order to do this, we need first to add the Filter in the filter options.

First we click on the video and filters in the main menu.

Figure 4.11 – Add a Logo to a Video

76
Then we choose the filter Meta filter group in order to add the new filter.

Figure 4.12 – Add a Logo to a Video

77
Now we click on the button to configure the filter and add it to the video.

We have then a Logo Setup window opened where we can set up the logo position on the video.

Figure 4.13 – Add a Logo to a Video

The logo file format can be only a JPG file. And the X and Y position will determine where the logo
will be located on the video file.

Warning:
If we use another image file format instead of JPG, we will have a scrambled error image in the file.

78
Transparency for the logo

The Logo does not support alpha transparency. The Alpha value is an overall transparency control
where 255 is fully opaque, 0 is completely invisible, and the values in between cause the bitmap to
be partially transparent. The blending uses linear interpolation.

We then choose the location where the logo will be displayed on the video file.

Figure 4.14 – Add a Logo to a Video

Note that as much we decrease the value from 255 to 0 in the “Alpha” option in the logo window we
increase the transparency of the logo.

79
Figure 4.15 – Add a Logo to a Video

Warning:
We need to be careful with the size of the JPG image file because if it is too big it will fill up most of
the video file displayed area.

80
Appendix

Shortcuts in AVIDEMUX

Unfortunately, AVIDEMUX does not have the option where we can customize shortcuts.

We have preset shortcuts in the software as we can see bellow:

Ctrl + O = Open

Ctrl + S = Save

Ctrl + U = Queue

Ctrl + M = Save image as BMP

Ctrl + E = Save image as JPGE

Ctrl + W = Close

Ctrl + Q = Quit

Ctrl + Z = Undo

Ctrl + X = Cut

Ctrl + V= Paste

Ctrl + C = Copy

Del = Delete

Ctrl + Alt + F = Filters

Ctrl + T = Go to time

Play / Stop = Space

Previous Frame = Left

Next Frame = Right

Previous Intra-frame = down

Next Intra-frame = Up

First Frame = Home

Last Frame = end

Go to Marker A = PgUp

305
Go to Marker B = PgDown

External links

Tools - scripting shell

306
Index
appendix
305
artifacts
126, 127, 141, 157, 162, 187, 235, 238
audio
3, 4, 6, 10, 18, 19, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 282, 283, 286,
287, 288, 289, 290, 292
auto-split
55
avi
6, 10, 35, 36, 42, 43, 44, 55, 59, 60, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299
blur
235, 236, 237, 238
boarder
81, 82, 83, 84
brightness
204, 205, 206, 207, 212, 213, 214, 215
calculator
18
chroma
141, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 226, 235, 238, 239
clip
147, 159, 162, 163, 165
codec
35, 36, 38, 42, 62, 226, 282, 289, 292, 298
codecs
10, 42, 59, 304
colour
104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 208, 209, 210, 211, 273, 279
colours
66, 193, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210
compatible
21, 295
compressed
10, 35, 36, 289
compression
60, 62, 245, 248
configuration
18, 122, 126, 139, 147, 149, 151, 155, 159, 163, 168, 173, 177, 181, 185, 189, 190, 195, 209, 214,
215, 220, 225, 227, 254, 279
configure
21, 69, 78, 83, 87, 94, 100, 106, 112, 117, 122, 126, 127, 128, 133, 139, 147, 155, 158, 168, 188, 194,
201, 205, 213, 217, 222, 232, 236, 241, 244, 247, 250, 253, 257, 260, 264, 268, 271, 275, 278
conversion
62, 292, 293, 294, 297
convert
10, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299
converted
189, 292
copy

307
38, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 282, 289, 291, 292, 305
create
13, 42, 55, 62, 165, 170, 173, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 185, 186, 191, 197, 203, 207, 211, 215, 220,
225, 266, 269, 282, 291, 292, 295
crooked
120
crop
92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97
cut
56, 59, 61, 95, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 305
decoder
38
decoders
32, 38, 41, 43
deinterlacers
165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170
delete
54, 286, 287, 288, 305
delogo
251, 255, 256, 257, 258
display
18, 29, 273, 281
download
10, 266, 269
dvd
24, 46, 187, 230, 270, 273, 282, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299
edit
48, 54, 55, 56, 66, 193
editing
9, 10, 35, 56, 136
encoding
18, 35, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 189, 230
enlarging
126, 127
extract
66, 270, 286
fade
98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103
fades
98
files
25, 35, 38, 39, 40, 43, 46, 48, 61, 62, 193, 266, 270, 291, 292, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304
flips
110
format
10, 18, 21, 22, 35, 36, 42, 44, 46, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 78, 266, 270, 276, 282, 289, 290, 291, 293, 298,
299, 304
frame
19, 29, 52, 53, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 87, 89, 90, 118, 136, 141, 145, 147, 159, 171, 175, 187, 230, 281,
283, 284, 285, 296, 305
frames

308
29, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 73, 115, 117, 122, 136, 137, 141, 147, 150, 187, 189, 230, 266
gamma
193, 212, 213, 214, 215
green
95
grey
104, 106, 108, 109, 196, 208, 209, 210, 211
high-resolution
251
horizontal
110, 112, 153, 154, 155, 156, 163
install
10, 14, 38, 269
installation
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
invert
134, 137
jpg
62, 63, 78, 80
key-frames
62
keyframes
59
logo
76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 251, 255, 256, 257, 258
making
9, 59, 230, 245, 246, 247, 248
marker
51, 52, 53, 59, 305, 306
mask
95, 258
methods
124, 126, 136, 139, 147, 149, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192
mirror
110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 182
mode
18, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 139, 147, 149, 150, 151, 157, 189, 190, 282, 292
modes
61, 137, 140, 189, 190
motion
151, 157, 159, 189, 230
multi-audio
43
noise
66, 81, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 238, 239, 245, 248, 252, 259
ntsc
63, 85, 115, 296, 297
old-versions
269
opening
46, 47, 65

309
overwrite
74
pixel
230, 235, 262
play
29, 89, 266, 305
playback
18, 19, 187, 189
player
42, 266, 270
quick
9, 13, 22
ratio
23, 36, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 174, 293, 294, 297
remove
54, 66, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 141, 208, 209, 210, 211, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 230, 235, 242,
251, 255, 256, 257, 258
removes
81, 137, 208, 210, 221, 255
removing
230, 251, 286
resize
124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 293, 297, 302
rotate
120, 121, 122, 123
rotates
120
saturation
212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220
scale
104, 106, 108, 208, 209, 210, 211, 268
screenshot
62
sharpening
159, 230, 252
sharper
66, 127, 251
sharpness
235, 251
size
18, 21, 36, 55, 62, 69, 70, 71, 80, 83, 94, 95, 97, 126, 189, 273, 293, 294, 302, 303
slow
85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 151
slower
62
small
9, 292
smaller
62
smoother
230

310
smoothing
230, 235, 245, 248
snapshot
63
sound
42, 60, 151, 282, 292, 298
sounds
283
soundtracks
43, 286
space
59, 305
speed
62, 87, 88, 117, 122, 230
speeds
85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91
split
175
splits
147
subtitle
266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 273, 276, 277, 279
subtitler
266, 269, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280
subtitles
66, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276
subtitling
273
sync
48, 54, 56
synchronisation
282, 283
synchronization
115
synchronize
56, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119
text
276
timing
56, 102
toolbar
17, 20, 46
toolbars
27
transform
66, 67, 293
transmission
273
transparency
79
updates

311
15
users
10, 31, 187
version
15, 16, 34, 151, 187, 230, 248, 251, 266, 269
versions
10, 266, 269
vob

whole
117, 219, 270, 291, 292
workaround
56
wrong
130, 190
xvid
38, 226
youtube
10
zoom
27, 28

312