Some open source software, fairly or unfairly, has acquired a reputation for being “poor man’s” clones of commercial projects, outside the popular acceptance of Linux servers and Firefox browsers. Video software, worse, has typically been labeled unusable, because of the primitive state of some early projects.

But make no mistake: the real appeal of open source video software is to take a bite out of the hassle and often-sluggish performance of bigger, aging commercial apps and frameworks.

That’s a lesson many users of VLC, the stripped-down but high-performance multi-platform video player, have already learned. It’s a server. It’s a player. It’s (as of 1.0) a basic video conversion tool. It runs everywhere (Mac, Windows, Linux). In short, it’s all of the things QuickTime Player once promised to be. The need for an open alternative has become plainer with the release of QuickTime X, which looks slicker but strips out some essential features of the previous QuickTime Pro.

I’ve been waiting for this to arrive for some time now. It doesn’t matter which OS you use, since standards have raised for media rendering (in general) there hasn’t been a single program that is both easy and powerful.  VLC feels like the modern day winamp that just does way, way more.

Permalink: http://createdigitalmotion.com/2010/01/vlmc-open-source-video-editing-from-vlc-creators/

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