Chop up your MPEGs with this fast and easy tool

MPEG editing tools are often bulky, bloated and slow. So it’s refreshing to find an editor that lets you cut up MPEG videos quickly and without any fuss.

Womble MPEG-VCR is designed to perform video editing without any frame accuracy. The program supports all MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 bit streams, including Transport streams for HDTV. This makes it perfect for chopping ads out of movies that you’ve downloaded.

The speed of MPEG-VCR is something to marvel at. Not only does it load video very quickly but it also facilitates quick scrubbing of movies, allowing you can fly through them with the cursor key, mouse, or slider.

The editing tasks you can perform in MPEG-VCR are pretty basic, and you’re pretty much limited to just cutting and pasting, and applying transition effects. That said, this stripped-down approach does facilitate quick production, and I especially like the way you can hop through the video frame-by-frame just by mouse-clicking.

In terms of writing your finished project to disk, MPEG-VCR is great because it doesn’t require you to re-encode the video. This means it only takes as long as a standard disk-to-disk copy operation.

The user interface in MPEG-VCR isn’t the greatest I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s pretty ugly. The tiny, garish icons are not very self-explanatory and it would look more at home on Windows 95. The lack of drag and drop support is also something that irritated me a bit.

That said, if you need to edit MPEG videos in a hurry, MPEG-VCR represents a quick and reliable solution.