6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Video

Increasingly, from blogs to marketing materials to online video show production, web workers are working with video. The good things you can do with online video go far beyond YouTube, and there are a number of free applications and utilities–many of them open source–that you can turn to to help with web video tasks. In this post, I’ll round up six of my favorites.

If you send video of any kind out on a network basis, look into Xvid. This free application compresses video files, which are often huge and unwieldy in size. I’ve gotten better than 100-to-1 compression ratios with Xvid.


Blender is not only one of the best graphics programs from the open source world, it’s one of the best open source applications of any kind. Widely used in the video and animation communities, it’s great for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and playback. You can also use it on Windows, Mac or Linux systems.

If you use a Mac, Simple Theora Encoder is a free open source application that can convert multiple files at once from several different formats, including .avi, .mov, and mp4. In keeping with the application’s name, you just hit Encode and you’re off to the races.

For simple video tasks, Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft is free, and it’s more than good enough at editing tasks to do professional-looking short videos. It comes complete with a library of slick video transitions.

MediaInfo is a free, open source application that specializes in giving you a complete taxonomy of properties for audio and video files. It has only a 1.3MB footprint–small enough that I carry a version on my pocket USB thumb drive. If you have the Windows version of MediaInfo installed, you can also add it to your right-click context menus so that you can get to the properties of a video or audio file with one mouse click.

VirtualDub is a free program for Windows users that works as a video capture and processing utility. It’s not quite as feature rich as a tool such as Adobe Premiere, but it is faster and easier to work with.

Do you know of any good, free video applications or utilities?

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