JayCut - Free Video Editor for Google Chrome OS

I know I'm a minority within a minority, but sometimes I miss Windows MovieMaker -- a free, no-frills non-linear editor (NLE) for when all I want to do is trim and splice a few clips, add a few dissolves and a soundtrack and publish to YouTube.

It's not because I haven't tried a real NLE. I bought Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 for the old Windows machine, but I am not that excited about learning it -- and find myself transcoding the .mts files from my GH2 to .wmv so I can use MovieMaker.

Okay, so why the title of this post? It's because Google gave me a free Google Cr-48 Chrome OS laptop a couple of months ago as part of a pilot program. This isn't a computer blog, so I won't bore you with the details, but a few thousand folks are test driving Google's new OS to see how it fares in the real world. So far, so good -- but I couldn't find a video editing app for it -- until now.

After running across this tutorial from NixiePixel on the free kdenlive video editor for Linux, I discovered that there were several free and relatively simple NLEs for Linux -- but only one for Chrome -- something called JayCut. Just signed up for it tonight and uploaded an .mp4 video that I had downloaded, but could not play on the Cr-48 -- and, wonder of wonders, it played back just fine in the preview window! It's late, so I didn't drag it into the timeline or try to add another clip. Perhaps tomorrow. But if I can get this to work, it will mean one more thing that I can do for free in Google Chrome OS -- and one more step towards doorstop status for the old Windows dinosaur.

UPDATE 3/8/11: Sadly, I could not get JayCut to read .mts files from the Panasonic GH2. Back to Windows (for file conversions, at least).