It wasn't that long ago that it was impossible to find good, free open source tools for working with and viewing video. Now that video runs rampant on the web, though, there are a whole lot of applications worth getting, even if you're currently happy with your video and encoding tools. Here are eight good applications to try.

It's no secret that one of the biggest things that Linux in general is lacking of is a good, simple video editor. There's a lot of video editors available yet none are exactly any good except for, in my opinion, PiTiVi.

It wasn't that long ago that it was impossible to find good, free open source tools for working with and viewing video. Now that video runs rampant on the web, though, there are a whole lot of applications worth getting.

When it comes to video playback on Linux, the premiere choice for video acceleration is currently using VDPAU with its CPU-efficient, GPU-accelerated capabilities that even has no problems playing 1080p video files with extremely low-end hardware.

A how-to on using FFmpeg to copy audio and video streams from one container to another without re-encoding them. Downloading a video from YouTube is pretty easy these days thanks to various browser extensions; and if the downloaded video is in a .mp4 container, I don’t have do anything since just about any video player, including my 1st generation PopcornHour reads them just fine.

Encoding is a CPU-intensive operation. Whilst encoding, using optimised code is crucial. In this short article I will explain how I gained a 300% speed boost when encoding DVDs and will show how having the program’s sources and being able to talk to the maintainers sometimes really, really helps. Welcome to doing things “the GNU/Linux way”.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

I recently got a Kodak zi8 video recorder. It works great in Fedora 12 so I was inspired to create a 15-minute video highlighting five fun things in Fedora 12.

OGMRip is an application and a set of libraries for ripping and encoding DVD into AVI, OGM, MP4, or Matroska files using a wide variety of codecs. It relies on mplayer, mencoder, ogmtools, mkvtoolnix, mp4box, oggenc, lame, and faac to perform its tasks.