No video for you (at least not today)
I am pissed. So pissed that my language will probably stronger than usual. I have work to do but I can't.
Yesterday was the March RLUG meet where I recorded videos of all presentations and I was supposed to start today editing, uploading and sharing them. Unfortunately, Kdenlive, the tool I settled on after extensive research refuse to cooperate: is broken when placing clips on the tracks. It must be the massive yum update I performed a couple of days ago after a long time of laziness: I see in the logs updates for mlt, kdelibs-common and qt, it should be one of them. I can do a yum downgrade for mlt and kdelibs-common, but that's even worse: "kdenlive: error while loading shared libraries: libmlt.so.2: cannot open shared object file".
I don't know what conclusion to draw from here:
- stop doing any updates
- stop using KDE apps
- stop hoping Linux can ever be used for video editing
For the short term, there are a couple of possible solutions for me:
- put the videos on keep and forget about them for a while (I hope my next week will be even busier with some photography stuff), maybe another update will fix the things and I can continue with the work
- turn back to the only trused and reliable video editor available for Fedora, mencoder (PiTiVi is useless, Kino can't do HD, Avidemux is a tool for a different job, Kdenlive just let me down and I don't think we have something else in an usable repository) and do only some rough work before uploading - just splitting and merging, no titles, no effects, no nothing.
Posts
I only say cinelerra.
ReplyDeleteIt never left me alone sitting starring on a crash screen.
Regressions are annoying, I always fear to upgrade the kernel, and see what is broken after reboot. But the most annoying thing when I report a bug about the regression, and haven't got any answer for months.
ReplyDelete@Leszek Lesner: thanks for the suggestion, but last time when I tried it (a couple of years ago) I got nothing but crashes... and it is available only on repos conflicting with rpmfusion.
ReplyDelete@bobpoljakov: with the kernel you at least have the option to reboot and choose from GRUB an older one (and yes, I had my share of losing hardware support after upgrades in the past).
ReplyDeleteIt seems it was something wrong with blog comments, I received this insightful advice directly, thanks killphi (still, seems like something for TODO, not for today):
ReplyDeletekillphi wrote:
> I feel your pain.
> Although I don't have any "real" work to do, I - finally, after years - got up
> and looked for a usable non-linear video editor available for Fedora. I found
> kdenlive and was almost immediately deeply in love.
> Then the update to Qt 4.6.x came and broke kdenlive 0.7.6
> I took that opportunity to upgrade my desktop machine from x86 arch to x86_64
> arch, however to keep the story from expanding too much.
>
> MY FIX
> - Install MLT-0.5.0 (I enabled it from updates-testing for one update)
> - Install pretty much every devel-tool you need for that
> - compile kdenlive 0.7.7.1 yourself
>
> I know, it isn't quite elegant, but it got the work done for me. There seems
> to be some packaging stuff in RPMFusion that doesn't work, which is why this
> essential update hasn't come along, yet.
> My hopes for the future: Quicker Updates for kdenlive and cinelerra in RPM
> Fusion. I've also read the idea that kdenlive could be "stripped down" to
> it's most basic functionality, integrated into normal Fedora repositories and
> then "kdenlive-extras-freeworld" from RPM Fusion.
> Anyway, these are my 2 pence. I hope I helped you to somewhat shed some light
> on the issue.
> And I share your hopes of making Linux NLVE and "non-breakage by the means of
> updates" viable in the near future.
> - killphi
A fix is on the way, unfortunately, kdenlive maintainership is a bit in flux and rpmfusion folks have been a little slow getting it sorted out.
ReplyDeleteOn the positive side, see also,
http://www.thisweekinlinux.com/2010/03/why-i-love-fedora-linux/
Quick followup (should've checked my facts first), but there are fixed kdenlive packages available now in rpmfusion-free-updates-testing
ReplyDelete@nicu
ReplyDeleteThats true you need to compile it yourself. The prebuild packages (especially the rpm packages I found) are mostly crap.
Ah and confuse cinelerra with cinelerra cv. I meant the cv version thats working fine here (for 2 years now) (on a debian based system though).
So you surely need a bit of work to have a good video editing system running. But its worth it.
Nicu, have you tried openshot? http://www.openshotvideo.com/
ReplyDeleteat Rex advice, tried kdenlive from updates-testing and it seems to work
ReplyDelete@mairin: OpenShot is not available in any Fedora repo I am aware of... IIRC until recently they had only Ubuntu packages.
ReplyDeletei'd go with openshot, it's the only straightforward and functional video editor i've seen for linux.
ReplyDeleteBlender has a very very good sequencer that you might be interested in.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous: I got quite a few recommendations for using Blender for this job, but honesty, I am still scared by its user interface (I acknowledge, I tried Blender a few years ago, so I'm not very up to date).
ReplyDeleteUntil the vlcvideo editor is ready, I've been using ffmpeg with start/stop options to pick parts and then merge. If you don't mind adding a conversion, ffmpeg to avi format, then user avimerge, avisplit, etc, to play.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you could just use ffmpeg, though.
Bill, I use mencoder a lot for editing, but those videos are a bit more than split and merge: they have titles, subtitles, credit screens and so, they need a few advanced features.
ReplyDelete