Late Night Video Fun

Last night, 8 PM. I had a 60 minute video file and I wanted to save the last 3 minutes, and only the last 3 minutes. So I needed a video splitter. It had to be simple enough that I wouldn’t need to spend hours learning it just to make one split, and it had to be free because I only needed to use it one time.

There are a number of free video splitters, but every splitter I downloaded had problems. My video was a Matroska, a frequently-encountered container format, but some splitters could not write a Matroska output file so that was one hurdle. One splitter was so user-unfriendly that I couldn’t figure out how to use it—another hurdle. One splitter could split the file and save the result, but the file length of the result was zero. Another splitter could make any number of splits but would not allow me to define the split points. I even installed VSDC, a nonlinear video editor, but its interface had changed since I last used it and I would have to spend hours re-learning it. And on it went, for three hours.

Finally I dusted off an old splitter that I downloaded a few years ago: Avidemux. I hadn’t tried Avidemux to this point because it is complicated enough that you really have to know a lot about video to use it. But the old Avidemux had no problem reading the video file, and it was easy to set the start and end points.

I left the defaults alone and let Avidemux do its thing. There was one glitch. When I told it to save the file, I got a popup box that read,

“Using H264/H265 in AVI is a bad idea. MKV is better for that. Do you want to continue anyway?”

I didn’t want AVI, I wanted MKV, so I clicked No. Then Avidemux complained that it couldn’t open the Muxer. So I saved the file again, only this time I clicked Yes when it asked if it should continue.

It produced a nice video file. Except for one very tiny problem: the brightness of the video flickered just a little, now and then. Maybe it was because the program needed updating, or maybe one of the dependent libraries needed updating. Maybe it was just a bug. So I downloaded the latest version of Avidemux from FossHub and ran it.

It wrote the output without doing any encoding. (That’s important because re-encoding degrades the quality of the video.) This newer version didn’t object to my using “H264 in an AVI”. It was MKV all the way in a split second. (I know I just came dangerously close to coining a pun.) The video it produced was perfect.

I wish I had more video editing skills. There was a time I did. But that was many yarns ago and I’ve forgotten far more than I remember. Now I know just enough to get myself in trouble. But I muddle onward.

Then it was time for the second big decision of the evening. Do I pour a couple of shots before going to bed, or do I pop the cork on that bottle of Shiraz?

So many decisions.