My daughter won the Colorado High School 4A State Championship for #2 Singles in tennis this past weekend. High school team tennis runs with 7 lines, with 3 singles lines (1-3) and 4 doubles (1-4). My daughter plays line 2, primarily because the state champion at line 1 is also on her team. Her team also had finalists in the #3 doubles line. And they topped it all off by finishing 3rd in the team standings (best finish yet, beating out last years team champion who finished 4th) and winning the Sportmanship trophy. All in all, a very nice weekend for parents.

So what does this have to do with my usual ramblings? Well, my daughter got inteviewed by a local TV station that played the interview on the 6 o'clock news. I recorded it with MythTV. There were a lot of stories in girls tennis that day, so I needed to edit out the extra crap, including commercials. But last I looked – which was at least a couple of years ago – video editing on linux wasn't in great shape.

My how things change. You can try a couple of different options now: Kino, Main Actor, and Cinelerra are popular choices. But I found the easiest to install (thanks to the Dag repositories for Fedora) and simplest to learn was Avidemux2.

Avidemux2 supports splicing video clips together, embedding different audio and save the audio and video tracks to separate files. There are also various filters for both video and audio though no effects filters that I can find (maybe I just don't understand what the existing filters are for?).

mythtv uses the NuppleVideo file format (.nuv) for saved recordings of live tv. Normally you would have to convert this to some other format like AVI to do editing. But Avidemux2 can directly edit this format.

I was able to install avidemux2 using yum, start it and load the .nuv file, mark and splice the commercials and extra material and save the edits to an AVI file all in about 1/2 hour. The resulting file is about 40MB. I tried saving to dvd format as well, though I'm not completely clear on how to use the interface. There is an option for setting the Video format as well as an option for setting the output file format. I think that is because the file format is just a container and the video format is stuffed inside that.

In any case, the AVI and DVD formats don't play well when downloaded via firefox on my wife's machine though they play fine wih mplayer on my Linux box. I'm still trying to work out where the incompatibilities lie. It has something to do with the formats I've chosen, I'm sure. But the end result is that I now have a video editor that is fairly easy to use.