First experience with Avidemux on Mountain Lion

[gomtu]

Okay, I was looking for a cheap video editor that I could cut commercials out of shows with, and after slogging around with stuff that didn't work I dug up instructions for Avidemux on my new Mac Mini running Mountain Lion. I tried 2.5.4 and dutifully deleted the two lib files I was supposed to, and it came up, ran, loaded a file, and edited it but when I tried to save the file it crashed.

So I got version 2.5.3, and did the same thing with it, and this time it seems to be working. It didn't crash and it *appears* to writing the file out to disk, for a pretty long time. It was a 183 mb file before I cut a bit of it out, and it's been writing it out for almost an hour now.

Avidemux doesn't have any kind of progress bar on it to tell you how it's doing, but the menus all gray out, and in Activity Monitor I can see a lot of writes to disk going on, and Avidemux is using CPU still, so I assume it's working, and when the menus aren't grayed out anymore I'll assume it's done with the file. I'll let ya know....

[gomtu]

Okay, it ground on and on for two hours and never got anything done with that 183mb file, so I killed it. I guess I keep looking for a video editor that can do .avi files.

....bummer...

[rumplestiltskin]

Why not MPEG Streamclip with the Perian plugin? All free.

[gomtu]

Why not MPEG Streamclip with the Perian plugin? All free.

I need to edit .avi files, and I'd thought MPEGStreamclip wouldn't do that, hence it's name. I'll have another look at it....
Well yes, it will do that. Thank you

It's a bit slow, and it really gobbles CPU, but it works.... well maybe not, I get errors and no sound in VLC, which says "VLC does not support the audio or video format "undef", unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this."

Well that sounds rather hopeless....

So I'm trying to figure out what went wrong. I assumed I didn't define the audio format, but I don't really know how to do that, which of them to pick. The choices in MPEGStreamclip do not include MP3, and that's what the stream info says it is. What to do? Is there a way to get MP3 as a choice? Import it into MPEGStreamclip somehow?

Scratching head here....