The “Shortmovie Evening” that we did last saturday at David’s place was a nice experience – It was a good motivation to dive deep into filmhistory, hunting the web for interesting short movies and directors. I’ll post the programm and links to the shown movies asap.
This event also forced me to search the internet for a tool that would allow me to edit mp4′s directly – something simple that would enable me to do some basic cut-up work, and ultimately join mp4-movies together in a simple and quick way. The first tool I came accross was Open Video Joiner [website], but after the installation I discovered you’re supposed to register the product (read: purchase). Well, for one thing, they could have told me that before I downloaded and installed their programm. The next piece of software I stumbled upon was Yamb, which is a user interface for MP4Box [info]. I downloaded and installed their latest beta version (version 2.1) and at first the programm looked quite promising, with a comprehensive interface – but when I tried to play the resulting mp4 in VLC or Mediaplayer the original individual mp4′s were all opened, stacked one upon another in multiple instances of the player. Version 1.6 (sporting a slightly more archaic interface) exhibited the same behaviour. I’m not the only one that ran into this problem – there are more people reporting this behaviour. Also something that people reported: when uninstalling Yamb 2.1 it deletes a good deal of your short-cuts in the start-menu of windows. Although I had read the reports on this behaviour I decided to go through the process, and uninstall it – And guess what? Yep, about half of my short-cuts dissapeared, forcing me to do a system restore. Bottomline: apart from me being stupid I can’t recommend Yamb and would even discourage people from installing it, reason why I’m not putting a link up to their site. Another MP4Box interface is My MP4Box GUI [info], I haven’t tried it out (yet) – since the next programm I came accros Avidemux [website]. Avidemux has a lot of things to offer, including the possibility to make cuts in mp4′s – it is said to have some troubles syncing sound and image, and indeed after joining together 12 mp4′s in one mp4-file the sound got completely out of sync from the 30th minute on. No problem when joining together 2 or 3 mp4′s though. Maybe something wrong with the original mp4′s? Bottomline: next time I need to join or split mp4′s I’m definitely going to try out My MP4Box GUI, for now Avidemux did the trick. Avoid Yamb, as their latest beta can seriously mess up your system. For burning DVD’s Imgburn [website] is the way to go.