MPEG Streamclip Goes Where iMovie Can’t

We have all been there: You shot a video on your digital camera; you drag it into iMovie, and then: Rejected! For all its simplicity and “it just works” philosophy, too many video formats are rejected by Apple’s introductory video editing application, causing major headaches for editing novices. So after scouring the depths of Google, I found MPEG Streamclip. With ease, it stepped up to the plate and knocked my video out of the park.

Feed Streamclip a raw MPEG video — like the one from my Sony Cyber-shot camera that iMovie is so picky about — and quickly export into a variety of formats. You can output to an iFriendly QuickTime video, a DV, an AVI, an MPEG-4 or a variety of other formats. Like QuickTime Pro, you can even export just the audio or even a single still image frame.

I’m a sucker for simple apps that do one job, and do it really well. While its icon and interface may incite painful memories of Windows 98 software, you won’t have to look at it for very long. And perhaps best of all, MPEG Streamclip is free — a big surprise considering these types of lifeline apps always seem to strive on nickle-and-diming the consumer. If you do video editing with a variety of formats, developer Squared 5’s app may just get you out of a jam one day.