Command line video editing tools

Question

I'm looking for (linux) command line tools that can help with video editing. I am mostly interested in:

• Cutting
• Transitions
• Effects

Any pointers would be appreciated (I know ffmpeg can do basic cutting, but not much beyond that afaik).

Answer 1

Image Magick

Answer 2

Avisynth under WINE is your best bet. You can use ffmpeg or mencoder to do the actual encoding, and avisynth .avs files for the actual editing. You may have to use mencoder under WINE to access the avs files as well. I haven't tried this myself, but it should work, barring any WINE issues.

If this is part of some production app, if there's any way you can farm the work out to an actual windows computer you'll save yourself a lot of pain.

If you want to get your hands dirty you could try using the gstreamer and Gnonlin to make your own CLI video app. You can actually use a language like Ruby to call gstreamer from, so you don't have to use C.

Answer 3

Two tools I use are transcode and mencoder.

Transcode is a suite of command line utilities for transcoding video and audio codecs, and for converting beween different container formats.

A variety of video and audio pre and post-processing filters are available, including (but not limited to):

• framerate conversion
• smoothing
• cutting

MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool based on mplayer.