What’s Better Than QuickTime Player? SimpleMovieX.

The digital media era means we have many solutions for the same digital media problems.

There must be a dozen complex Mac utilities for viewing or editing movies, including Apple’s QuickTime Player. Try Simple MovieX and learn to rejoice over simplicity again.

Editing digital video can be time consuming and come with a hefty learning curve, not to mention some expense. QuickTime Player lets you view and modify digital video, but has a set of built-in limitations, especially when it comes to editing and playback of file formats.

Simple MovieX is what you expect, and more. It’s a very simple video editor, arguably much easier to use than QuickTime Player for that purpose, but it comes with a bevy of other capabilities.

If you’ve ever played with iMovie, either the old version everyone loved, or the new version that old iMovie users have come to not love, then you know that digital video editing can get complex very fast. Plus, there are so many movie file formats available today that don’t seem to play nice in some movie editors.

Simple MovieX provides a few useful features that become glaringly handy after a single use.

First, digital video file formats. It’s almost nuts, there are so many. The most popular formats include Windows Media, AVI, MPEG and its various flavors MP4, H.264 and more. Apple’s QuickTIme, with the Flip4Mac plugin, does a decent job covering the major bases, but not the muxing mess of the original MPEG formats.

Second, Simple MovieX carries with it all the same capabilities as Apple’s Quicktime Pro, but you can also edit, merge, split, AVI files, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files without losing audio. You’ll still need the MPEG-2 playback component for QuickTime.

I love the timeline zoom feature and can’t understand why it doesn’t show up in all digital video players. Simple MovieX also lets you re-synchronize audio in movies where it gets out of wack. There’s keyframe indicator which lets you know when you’re on a keyframe, and a batch converter to let you export video to a bunch of different formats and bit rates.

Older versions of QuickTime have some limitations on movie file sizes and chokes on anything beyond 4 gigabytes. Not so with Simple MovieX, which even handles AVI files beyond 1, 2 and 4 gigabyte sizes.

Back to the audio synchronization. You can see an audio waveform along with the movie which helps you locate sections for cuts, then resynchronize the audio using the sync indicator and audio arrows.

I record a lot of television shows using ElGato’s EyeTV, but their tool for removing commercials is klunky at best. Simple MovieX lets you move through a TV show as if it was TiVo, stop and mark the commercial sections in and out points, then batch delete all the annoying commercials.

Chapter markers can be inserted in MPEG-4 format, which can also be edited, split, merged, saved, converted. What you get is nearly everything that comes in the QuickTime Pro package, and a lot more.

If you’re just getting into digital video editing, and find that iMovie in iLife ‘08 is too confining, check out Simple MovieX.