Making simple crop edits to videos of all formats shouldn’t be tricky business, but most tools out there either do way too much or are so belabored with ads that who knows what evil lurks within their code.

Open-source on the GNU license, Avidemux is a breath of fresh air. Cropping a video is as simple as selecting the section you want to remove and then hitting the Delete key. Re-encoding a video is equally painless: select the output format from the drop-down list, save the file, and you’re good to go. When choosing where to start and stop a crop, there’s both incremental and multisecond advance and rewind tools, There’s also a not insubstantial list of video and audio codecs that files can be converted to. Video formats include multiple codecs for FLV, MPEG, AVI, VCD, H.263/4, and others, while audio formats include MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and one or two more.

The program also includes advanced options, including generic decoder and post-processing tools, user-defined filters, GlyphSet adjustments, and more features. Avidemux should appeal to users of all abilities who are looking for a quick way to edit down video files.