Avidemux is a free tool that is readily available on Linux. The best use that I’ve found for it is extracting clips from a video (it is apparently a flexible tool, and I’ve heard - perhaps wrongly - that you can actually edit video using it. However, I use the excellent but commercial software Main Actor for editing, so my use case here is restricted. Why aren’t I just extracting the clips using Main Actor? Simply because Avidemux seems to recognize more encodings than Main Actor does.)

Extracting clips is easy. I’ve numbered this screenshot (in green):

Here’s what each of these buttons does:

1) Skip back to previous keyframe (i.e. previous scene)
2) Skip forward to next keyframe (i.e. next scene)
3) Mark beginning of selection (sometimes you need to press this twice for some reason — see 5)
4) Mark end of selection
5) Information: the start and end frames of your current selection
6) Output encoding (you only need to choose this once — experiment until you find one that works well)
7) Output format (see 6)
Save selection

That’s all there is to it. Skip forward or back using 1/2; mark selection using 3/4; Save selection using 8. I find it most efficient to review the clips using mplayer from the command line, but, naturally, use whatever viewer you feel most comfortable with.

Now you can import the clips into your video editor and create your masterpiece.

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