On 11/16/2012 07:56 PM, Ivan K wrote: If you just want to do simple cutting down, avidemux is probably the simplest to use, and if you'd like to do any kind of fades or other transitions, either kdenlive, or if you don't want Qt dependencies, openshot (in my experience a little simpler but more idiosyncratic). In ubuntu it's just "apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras". I imagine there's an equivalent in fedora, but haven't used an RPM-based system in about 4 years. ffmpeg will handle mp4 files, but I don't know if that's what the video editors use. That's what I'd try first. If nothing else, installing it should pull in the appropriate dependencies. As someone else suggested, webm is open, and fairly well-supported for an open format. Just now I typed this: time ffmpeg -i Sandy_hits_Lake_George.mp4 Sandy-lake-george.webm It took 39 seconds on my 3-year-old dual-core laptop to transcode a 30-second h.264/aac/mp4 video from someone's phone into a vpx/vorbis/webm video, resulting in a file of about the same size as the original using default parameters. There was some motion artifacting, as you might expect from a transcode at a low bitrate (about 700kbit total), but you can always force a higher output bitrate with -b. You can do the same conversion with avidemux, if you prefer GUIs for trivial tasks. Rob