The Avidemux developers announced on Saturday (February 8th, 2009) the fourth point release of the Avidemux 2.4 branch. This  bugfix version is probably the last one from the 2.4.x series, as the developers will concentrate their attention on the upcoming 2.5 and 2.6 branches. While the Avidemux 2.5 will be a big "code clean-up" and modularization branch, the Avidemux 2.6 is a long-term overhaul of the source code, which means that the developers will switch from a frame-based, constant frame rate model to a time-based one... fixing all the audio/video sync issues encountered on files with variable a frame rate, such as MPEG or FLV. Without any further introduction, here are the main features of this release:

· Better support for H.264 in MP4 container;
· Better support for H.264 in M2TS and MPEG-TS containers;
· Better support for JPEG files;
· Improved decoding of PNG files, with the help of libavcodec;
· Better DIB/BMP decoding, with the help of libavcodec;
· The colorspace handling for BMP, DIB and RAW video was improved;
· The QT-based interface was greatly improved and it is now considered fully functional;
· When encoding with x264, the same setting will be used for both passes;
· Added PPC64 support;
· The Avidemux CLI (command-line interface) received AAC audio support;
· The ECMAscript was greatly improved. It contains now a new function for the DirectorySearch class, called GetFilePath(). Also, the exec() function was fixed;
· If the A marker is bigger than the B marker, the saving of video will be stopped;
· Fixed some reading issues with various MOV files;
· Fixed FAAC support;
· Fixed an important bug which caused the muxers to drop the first few B-frames;
· Fixed the "Previous Black Frame" function.

"This will probably be the last version from the 2.4 branch. [...] The next targets are 2.5 and 2.6. The 2.5 branch is in good shape and is really close to 2.4 as far as features and stability are concerned. The next release will be a 2.5 one, and it will live most of 2009 probably." - said Mean, Avidemux's main developer, in the official release announcement.

Avidemux 2.4.4 also updates the translation files for the following languages: Russian, Czech, Catalan, French, Italian and Spanish.

Avidemux is one of the fastest and best video editors/converters you will find these days... did I mention it’s also 100% FREE?

Download Avidemux 2.4.4 right now from Softpedia.