Well, Kino works all well and good, but it looks like it was really desinged to work with raw video streams from camcorders and what not.  Another case of RTFM.  I did find Avidemux, which looks friendly and works with divx (mpeg4) and alot of other formats.  I will give that a try tonight.
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

There are packages for it on the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front).