I wanted to grab some clips of some larger videos that I could put onto my iPOD to show some friends. I first tried to use XP’s own “Windows Movie Maker” but found that it only saves clips in WMV format which my converter for my iPOD chokes on.
In searching I found this article from USATODAY.COM that pointed me to exactly what I was looking for. I ended up downloading and using “VirtualDub” which lets me simply and easily pick a start and end point (use the cursor keys to find these points and use the “Home” and “End” keys to choose which is which) and then I save the clip as AVI.
Be warned that the output file is HUGE but as I’m only using it as an intermediate file to get to my iPOD this is livable. In one case about a 20 minute clip from a 500 Mbyte AVI clip yielded about a 9 Gbyte AVI file. But after processing with 3GP_Converter I ended up with a more reasonable 135 MByte MP4 file and then deleted the intermediate file.