Problems using Avidemux extracting snippets
 

I am a Mac user who uses Quicktime to quickly extract video snippets from .mov or .avi files.

I try doing this in Avidemux and all I get is video that is out of sync when it comes to audio as well as video that doesn't start properly at the A marker. What am I doing wrong. I just want something that is quick and dirty to extract snippets of video from .AVI and .MOV files. Should I try another application that you would recommend?

Is there a good video(s) explaining what I am trying to do? I checked quickly on Youtube and it seems that some of them are in languages other than English.

I really hope I can find something that will allow me to do what I need to do without having to go back to the Mac environment.

Have you taken a look at the mplayer package?

It includes a good encoder, called mencoder, that can take out parts of a vid and copy them or re-encode to a new stand-alone clip without problems that I've seen.

Due to using the mplayer package's codecs, it can access just about any video in any format you can reasonably encounter currently.

Without details, I'm just guessing here, but I've had similar things happen, and I believe the problem is inherent in the design of the formats themselves. For many media types you can't just copy out the streams at any arbitrary point and maintain synchronization, you have to cut them at the index (key) frames.

Instead of just copying the stream, you might try re-encoding to create a new video with only the frames you want, but of course this is a lossy operation.

I installed SMplayer. Does this include mencoder? How do I use mencoder to extract clips from an avi movie?