Supported file formats

Even cinematic masterpieces are encoded MP4, right?

At the very least, the video editor should be able to work with a variety of file formats and produce output files that are fit for appearing on different platforms, such as online publishing.

Thanks to their reliance on FFmpeg, most of the tools on our list can work with almost any video format, and render files in your desired format. All the tools present a large scrollable list of formats you can export files your project to, after you’re done editing the videos.

With Flowblade and others, you can also create a profile of the project, which depends on the source video files you wish to work on. All the tools are capable of correctly identifying the source of the files, and will suggest changing the profile if it’s different from the video files.

LiVES is different from the others in that it relies on mplayer decoder when working with the different formats. Both Kdenlive and LiVES support Firewire input, but this option isn’t yet available for the other tools.

Another useful feature of LiVES is that it can be used to capture external windows via mouse clicks. Coupled with its support to record audio from an external source, you can easily use the application to create professional-grade screencasts.

You can similarly use Openshot, which is quite handy at capturing feed from a webcam. Apart from choosing the video codec, resolution, aspect ration and so on, the tools also choose the audio channels, bitrate and more. The default setting for each of these varies according to the chosen output format, which can be Webm, Matroska, OGG, SWF and more.