Last year, while running Ubuntu, I decided I wanted to watch a video, so I opened it up in the built-in Totem player. What happened next took me back to the dark era of codecs and computing. The XviD video I was watching became pixelated, the video became out of sync; within a few minutes it was unwatchable.

Video editing is the process of editing motion video footage. In the new age of personal video, video editing is becoming a central function of the desktop, with the popularity of video editing software ever increasing.

When it comes to video playback on Linux, the premiere choice for video acceleration is currently using VDPAU with its CPU-efficient, GPU-accelerated capabilities that even has no problems playing 1080p video files with extremely low-end hardware.

In this talk I take you through how I produce podcasts like the Software Freedom Law Show and Linux Outlaws using only Free Software and Open Source solutions. Sound engineering is something I’ve done for a long time and it’s a real passion of mine. I hope that comes across in the talk.

A software application which handles the editing of video sequences on a computer is called video editing software. It can also handle limited editing of the audio clips which accompany the video or at least the ability to sync the audio with the video.

"The free software movement is a new social movement which aims to protect the rights of users to access and modify software. Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture, Richard Stallman is widely credited with launching the movement in 1983 by founding the GNU Project..."

In an open letter to Google, the Free Software Foundation suggested that the software giant freely release the VP8 HD video compression format after having acquired the On2 video technology firm.

There is a sizeable amount of free 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 avenues that are explored in this article.

"Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution.