There is an excellent set of free, open source video software available on the Linux platform which is both fully featured and mature. Become a digital video editing master, turn your Linux machine into a Home Theatre box are two options that are explored in this article.

We previously published an article on excellent open source video tools in 2008. Some of the tools featured in that article have ceased development. There were often developed by one or a few developers. They ceased working on the projects, in part because better alternatives sprung forward. Given the length of time that has elapsed, we thought it best to update the article.

There is one application that deserves a separate mention. It’s called Lightworks, an awesome professional non-linear editing system. It is very mature, and has multi-platform support. But it has no source code, and is released under a freemium license. But it’s still anticipated that the source code will be released soon.

Now, let’s explore the 42 video applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, providing a screenshot of the software in action, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

Video Software VLC Portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats GNOME Videos Official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment SMPlayer Qt based MPlayer front-end mpv Based on MPlayer and mplayer2 MPlayer Extremely powerful movie player bomi Powerful and easy-to-use open source multimedia player Miro A platform for Internet television and video Kaffeine Full featured media player for KDE Kodi Award-winning digital media hub and HTPC MythTV Provides a Home Theatre convergence box Kdenlive Non-linear video editor for KDE OpenShot Non-linear editor for GNOME, built with Python, GTK, and the MLT Framework Cinelerra 3 main functions: capturing, compositing, and editing audio/video LiVES Video Editing System designed to be simple to use, yet powerful PiTiVi Non-linear audio/video editor using GStreamer Open Movie Editor Non-linear video editor designed for basic movie making capabilities Avidemux Video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks Shotcut Powerful cross-platform video editor Flowblade Multitrack non-linear video editor Veejay Visual instrument and realtime video sampler Blender 3D content creation suite Natron Node-based compositing tool HandBrake Multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter dvd::rip Perl front end for transcode OGMRip Application and a set of libraries for ripping and encoding DVDs avconv Part of libav-tools; fork of FFmpeg Mencoder Simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies FFmpeg Real time audio/video encoder/converter, streaming server transcode Console based tools for transcoding video and audio files DeVeDeNG Create video DVDs, suitables for home players, from any number of video files DVDStyler Cross-platform DVD authoring application Q DVD-Author GUI frontend for dvdauthor and related tools GCStar Manages personal collections Data Crow Cataloger/media manager Tellico KDE application for organizing your collections dvgrab Receives audio and video data from a digital camcorder via an IEEE1394 Kazam Well designed and easy to use interface screencasting tool vokoscreen Screencast creator MKVToolNix Tools for the Matroska media container format SMTube Search, play and download YouTube videos Cheese Use your webcam to take photos and videos OBS Open Broadcaster Software

Return to our complete collection of recommended free and open source software including our latest additions.