VLC Team Announces Video Editor In the Works 120
eldavojohn writes "Despite news that VLC might not have anyone to work on the Mac release, Lifehacker brings word of a video editor that the VLC team is working on dubbed VideoLAN Media Creator. It hasn't been released yet (git clone git://github.com/VLMC/vlmc.git) but a pre-release is due out soon."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
No need for it (Score:3, Informative)
VLC for Mac death is "greatly exaggerated" / What is Lunettes?
VLC for Mac is being maintained. However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC, is not being maintained at this time.
The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC. Its codename is Lunettes.
Why a rewrite? This is something really easy to see. VLC for Mac is just not "Mac" enough.
Taken from here. [videolan.org]
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
VLC is great when it comes to playing media. I really can’t find fault with it on that front.
When it comes to encoding media... well, it’s good enough... usually... if you don’t mind playing with it a bit. (Admittedly it does seem better than it used to be. I used to find that more often than not the encoder would crash with some odd error in the message log.) It doesn’t seem to always create portable files – I’ve had output files that only played in VLC, or wouldn’t seek properly, etc. It can’t simultaneously capture the screen and the stereo mix (I have a .js that launches two copies – one to capture the screen, one to capture the stereo mix – and must recombine the separate video/audio tracks in an external video editing suite). Minor details like that...
I’m going to approach this with a considerable amount of skepticism until I find out how well this video editing feature works, unfortunately.
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I agree, it always takes several tries to output a working file when recording from internet stream too. And even then its a little bit risky stuff.
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It's interface really needs work too (Score:2)
I like VLC, don't get me wrong. It is a go-to program I use in many cases. The fact that it is entirely self contained makes it very useful. I use it in situations where installing the required codecs wouldn't be workable, and also to play back problematic media. For example at work I have Sony Vegas installed on my system which installs its own MPEG codecs. Now part of these codecs is they are really strict, they don't play broken media. Ok well and good, when you encode something you want it done right. H
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Sounds exciting (Score:5, Interesting)
If it has the same quality and compatibility as VLC Media Player, then it would be a welcome beacon here in Penguin Land.
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No kidding. I'm giving serious thought to getting a Mac -- just for its video editing.
To be fair, while I have tried every video editor that runs on Linux and found every single one lacking, it isn't entirely their fault. They can't import, or see the camera at all, and I assume that's a problem in the system, not the application. Will the VLC editor be able to work around this?
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To be fair, while I have tried every video editor that runs on Linux and found every single one lacking, it isn't entirely their fault. They can't import, or see the camera at all, and I assume that's a problem in the system, not the application.
Well, something is screwed up somewhere, because "seeing" and controlling a DV camera over a Firewire connection is a pretty trivial and well-understood affair.
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To be fair, while I have tried every video editor that runs on Linux and found every single one lacking, it isn't entirely their fault. They can't import, or see the camera at all, and I assume that's a problem in the system, not the application.
Well, something is screwed up somewhere, because "seeing" and controlling a DV camera over a Firewire connection is a pretty trivial and well-understood affair.
Indeed, it is simple. But allowing user level program access to firewire is actually a significant security risk, so most distros restrict access to /dev/raw1394, /dev/dv1394, /dev/video1394, or whatever the local device names are. This is probably the issue that GP is encountering. I make a shell script with the requisite "sudo chmod a+rwx /dev/dv1394" type commands to be run before invoking the program which is to control the dv camera and grab the video. These privileges should be revoked afterwards (and
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Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) Machine
Personal Identification Number (PIN) Number
Direct Memory Access (DMA) Access
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I believe they’re just two different names for the same thing.
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That's life on a Unix-like system I'm afraid. Ideally, distributions would have lovely baselayouts that would take care of ever
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Definitely a driver problem. Kino especially is pretty good at importing from a DV camera. You'd have to fix it for VLC too. Try
# modprobe raw1394
# modprobe ohci1394
# modprobe video1394
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It should be pretty easy to create a udev rule for that which automatically changes permissions when the camera is plugged in.
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Kdenlive imports from:
1. Low resolution camcorder (Raw and AVI DV editing).
2. Mpeg2, mpeg4 and h264 AVCHD (small cameras and camcorders).
3. High resolution camcorder files, including HDV and AVCHD camcorders.
4. Professional camcorders, including XDCAM-HD streams, IMX (D10) streams, DVCAM (D10) , DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50 streams and DNxHD streams (decoding only, encoding untested). Please note that Kdenlive does not offer the original codecs, but only that we use FFmpeg free software codecs, which can read or
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iMovie isn't nearly as useful as I'd hoped it would be. You'd have to go for Final Cut (Express/Pro) too if you got a mac. I'm excited to see what happens with the VLC editor.
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A beacon? Never heared of Kdenlive (http://www.kdenlive.org/) ?
The 'Penguin Land' already has a Sony Vegas killer. It's the AmaroK of video editing. It's Qt4.x and because of that cross platform.
Finally (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been waiting for this for a long time. I find it frustrating that I can play basically any video format at any resolution, while not being able to transcode. My computer obviously understands the video files, so why can't I take an .mpeg file and easily save it to quicktime format? All the open source video editing/transcoding tools are trash right now. A VLC video editor is going to be really awesome.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
VLC is already able to transcode media.
That said, I haven’t been overly impressed with its performance. Strange crashes, glitchy files, etc.
For instance, when transcoding a .flv, the first keyframe is always dropped – resulting in only a smear of black/gray for the first second or two of the output file.
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That said, I haven't been overly impressed with its performance. Strange crashes, glitchy files, etc.
Yup, it uses more CPU than it needs to, but at least it provides the support for various video formats that my files are in. Some of these issues are to blame on ffmpeg and others are purely on VLC. What would really be nice is if someone could implement some codecs using blocks [wikipedia.org], even if it is at this point purely to find out if this a) makes a notable difference in performance and b) provides code that is s
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ffmpeg -i INPUTFILE.mpeg -sameq outputfile.mov <-- Now it's quicktime compatiable
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God damn quicktime! Its sole saving grace is that it isn't as bad as realplayer. Screw realplayer!
Sorry about that. It is a natural reflex of mine that developed while using both products.
Avisynth (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Avisynth (Score:4, Informative)
No way. Avisynth is a Windows-only product that is tied to Microsoft's APIs. VLC is a cross-platform application.
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KDEnlive works for us (Score:2, Funny)
Ive been using KDEnlive for the past few months and it does the job for us.
We basically want to take a few pictures and videos from our digital camera, join them with a few transition effects and put our fave mp3 in the background.
It does the job the way Windows Moviemaker does the job, its not a 25,000$ program but for the youtube generation's needs, its fine.
Ive tried all the different Linux programs and both my 8yr old and nieces prefer KDEnlive, so its the one we use.
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Of course it can... an AVS script outputs a typical video stream. Will the script run on Linux, though?
oh no! (Score:4, Funny)
They’re out to get me!
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It made me think of Monty Python's "The Argument" sketch.
"But I came in here for an argument!"
"Oh, this is abuse. You want room 12a, down the corridor."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome." (Man he's speaking to leaves...)
"Stupid git!"
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Correction: they're out to git you.
What in tarnation is "git" fer? (Score:1, Offtopic)
lolz, but really... this is the first time I've seen the "git://" protocol specifier. I had to resort to the Fount of All Knowledge [wikipedia.org] to find out what in tarnation "git" is:
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>>I bet I'll end up seeing git:// all over the place on Slashdot soon.
Oh, no way. We all se bitkeeper here. Just because their logo is a triforce.
Thank you, I'm here all week.
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they need to get through 54320 of you first.
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They’re out to GIT me!
There, fixed that for you
Yeah yeah! Oh, yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)
I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998.
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Kdenlive [kdenlive.org] is a pretty good video editor for Linux, FreeBDS and MacOS X.
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I personally think it's because of the sad state that linux multimedia subsystems are in (oss/alsa/pulseaudio/whatever kde comes with up next), but whatever it is, linux video editing is nowh
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Kdenlive was unusable for me in Ubuntu (Hardy and Intrepid). It crashed within a minute, every time.
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I haven't done any video editing it in around 6 months, so I don't know what's their current status, but it did get noticeably more stable for me around the 0.7.3 version. Ah the wonders of Arch and rolling releases ;)
It would still crash occasionally, though. The only saving grace is that it's auto-save is impeccable.
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kdenlive is a piece of garbage, and its developers ought to be burned at the goddamn stake for making that abomination of a video editor.
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Ever hear of Kdenlive [kdenlive.org]? I use it all the time. Uses FFMPEG, has lots of nice effects, and the most recent release has been very stable for me so far ;)
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I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998.
Audacity does everything I want it to do. It doesn't include some of the functionality of tools like Adobe Audition or Soundbooth because that functionality is provided by other tools within the Linux environment.
If you need all this functionality bundled up with point-and-click ease, free Linux t
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On a command line basis, your argument may hold some merit.
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That's a tired, old argument that was laid to rest long ago.
I'm not making an argument, I'm just stating a fact: Linux GUI tools don't have those functions because most Linux developers don't feel a need for them.
But, in a GUI environment, it's ridiculous -- GUIs are the interface to pull all the little tools together.
That's only one of many possible functions of a GUI. Many professional users don't need a GUI to "pull all the little tools together", they need a simple UI that does a few things really well
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Nobody uses sox? But I'm an Asterisk sysadmin, you insensitive clod!
And, besides my job, I find myself using ffmpeg and sox all the time.
And, what you are saying about the little app that could is totally wrong. First, it's not a GNU/Linux concept, it's a Unix concept, and part of it's design.
If you think there are no apps like that being used today, well, less, cut, awk, find, grep and friends would like a word with you. Sure, users don't use them, but the Unix toolchain is still the way we do things aroun
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PiTiVi [pitivi.org] (wp [wikipedia.org]) seems interesting, not tried it myself so far.
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If you want a multi-track recording suite, check out Ardour.
http://ardour.org/ [ardour.org]
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I'll have to look into it more during the holiday break -- may have something to do with the fact that I'm a Fedora user, and we suffer from the PulseAudio affliction
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I agree on cinelerra but not on Audacity. Audacity is like Notepad for audio, it's simple and does it's thing well (and doesn't crash which makes it actually better than notepad).
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and doesn't crash
...but when it does, or when the computer crashes by no fault of Audacity’s, you’re fucked.
All those 1-second .au files? Yeah. Audacity helpfully offers to delete them for you, but what you really wanted to do was recover your work... which it can’t do... so you’re stuck with the tedious, boring task of importing dozens or hundreds of tiny audio clips to try and recover the audio that you recorded before it crashed.
Why there is no way to do this automatically is absolutely beyond my
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check out Audacity Recovery Utility - worked for me the one time I needed it.
http://www.mesw.de/audacity/recovery/ [www.mesw.de]
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Good to know. Thanks.
It looks like I had an older version of Audacity, anyway... according to that, versions beyond 1.3.2 have crash recovery built-in. I guess I’ll have to upgrade.
Since I don’t do long recordings in Audacity anymore anyway (that ended about 5 months ago), it’s really not an issue for me anymore, but it had been in the past, and always on a non-net-connected computer which made it difficult to Google up some solutions. (They’re probably still using that old version o
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"I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998."
Actually, it's not even as capable as Cool Edit was more than a decade ago. Specifically, Audacity does not support MIDI, whereas, AIR, Cool Edit Pro did. And that's the main reason why Audacity is utterly worthless for music production: because it can't sync to MIDI. So, no
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I've not tried it myself, but I've heard good things about OpenShot [openshotvideo.com]. I'd be interested to hear what people on here think about it.
Phillip.
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Can it Edit MKV files etc.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would like something that can open anything and then edit it.
It would be nice to have a good video editor, One that was free back in the day was DDClip it worked pretty good back in 00' . Anythign is better than the abortion that is Windows Movie Maker....
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I would like something that can open anything and then edit it.
It would be nice to have a good video editor, One that was free back in the day was DDClip it worked pretty good back in 00' . Anythign is better than the abortion that is Windows Movie Maker....
In the sense that VLMC can read anything and subsequently write something, yes, probably. I very much doubt the number of output formats will match the number of input formats, though.
I always thought Windows Movie Maker was good for video stitching, the problem was it could only output to a WMV, which is understandable (msft and all that).
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Anything that supports many formats and can edit them would be welcome.
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The question is whether the editing will happen directly with the 'compressed' streams or whether it will need to convert it to something akin to DV first?
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Pretty please? I can transfer all the videos off of my Canon Vixia HG-21 to my linux box with a simple "cp -a ", but I haven't yet seen a Linux video editor that doesn't choke on the AVCHD files.
Kdenlive edits AVCHD files perfectly well, although it can be a little buggy sometimes (though recently it's more stable). I tried it with AVCHD footage copied directly from my fuji camera. It opens the .MTS files from the stream folder correctly...
Vegas (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm hoping it take after Vegas, which leaves all other editors in the dust (even Avid) when it comes to ease of use. I especially like being able to drag the end of one clip over another on the time line for instant crossfades without having to deal with creating a transition. Fade in/out is a simple matter of dragging the upper corner of the clip one way or the other. Timelines are a series of thumbnails that change in real-time when you expand or contract, cut, stretch etc. (stretch/contract is a simple c
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"Similar" doesn't cut it. FC is woefully inadequate. You can't overlap media on the same timeline. Premier is especially annoying as it won't do a damned thing until you define a "project". In Vegas, you just drag clips onto the timeline from any file manager. It creates it's own internal project files which you can name and save or just toss if you want to. (quick & dirty one-off tasks don't need to be saved) FC also has a limited display of spaced thumbnails. Vegas has a continuous row directly refle
Gstreamer and MLT (Score:1, Interesting)
I guess I'll be the first to give a shout-out to Pitivi [pitivi.org] and Open Shot Video [openshotvideo.com].
Reading Jonathan Thomas' ( Open Shot Video ) valiant attempt at creating a NLE from Gstreamer/Gnonlin [sourceforge.net] it appears that the Gnonlin API/toolkit/whatever is VERY confusing to program a video editor in ( and unstable ). But since Jonathan chose MLT [mltframework.org] things are rapidly moving along for him. I often wonder why KDEnlive is so unstable because Kino is rock solid ( for me ) and it is also based on Dan Dennedy's impressive MLT toolkit.
But I
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Open Shot looks promising but from what I've seen by playing with it recently it really needs to implement the standard two viewer interface like almost every other NLE out there. I just can't stand to edit any other way. I'll keep my eye on it though as it seems to be making progress very rapidly.
I'm looking forward to http://lumiera.org/ [lumiera.org] as it seems to be the only project with the goal of creating a professional NLE/Compositing application. Nothing will make me happier when I can quit using Adobe Premiere
What aboout Avidemux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Avidemux [fixounet.free.fr] always seemed like a natural partner to VLC to me. Based off the same FFMPEG code, QT or GTK interfaces, straightforward design, and despite the name it can do many file types. It's excellent for simple cut and paste editing, very much a Linux equivalent of Virtualdub. Why do so many free software projects try to reinvent the wheel rather reuse and improve on the code that is out there? I always thought that was the point of free software.
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Re:What aboout Avidemux? (Score:4, Informative)
This has to do with errors in the broadcast you don't notice when watching.
To fix it you have to first clean the stream.
1. projectx to clean it. It's a nice little java program. Just start the GUI, open your file and choose quickstart. You can use the CLI as well
2. mplex -f 8 -o output.mpeg2 input.m2v input.mp2
3. manipulate output.mpeg2 with avidemux.
I've recorded hundreds of documentaries and shows (DVB-S mpeg2-ts), never had sync issues after doing this.
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That's not been my experience, but of course it may depend a lot on the version and platform. In any case, if you think a brand new project is likely to crash less, I've got news for you...
Truly an enlightened age... (Score:3, Interesting)
What is wrong with people (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite news that VLC might not have anyone to work on the Mac release
You mean despite the news that was clarified and proven false by the VLC project the day after everyone in the blogsphere and on tech forums went nuts : http://www.osnews.com/story/22629/VLC_for_Mac_Death_Greatly_Exaggerated_ [osnews.com]
Why repeat it if it never was true ? It didn't need to be part of the summary at all for that matter, the true story here has nothing at all to do with the Mac port.
This is nowhere near alpha quality (Score:2)
I'd say it's more pre-alpha.
I can't take seriously these project properties shown in the screenshot. "30 frames per second"? How do I use 29.97 exactly? 23.976? Where do I setup in the project properties that I want global de-interlacing using interpolation or blend fields or yadif? Or that it's progressive? Where do I tell the editor what the aspect ratio of my footage is?
And TWO preview panes? This is so last century.
That UI needs serious love btw, it looks extremely bad. Huge icons on the side of the pre
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Why don't you help out then.
Don't just sit there and complain on /dot.
Go over to their site and help code a better UI, post your suggestions, or even draw up some UI images?
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Just one. There's no reason for fluff. Modern NLEs only have 1.
This is good news (Score:2)
The FOSS movement needs this type of application. Linux needs to match the same type of applications than run or at least come standard with Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X in order to better compete with them. Since Apple has a video editor built into Mac OS X, Linux needs one as well. As a bonus a Windows port would get the Windows users happy to use a video editor and help them migrate to Linux by using the same software in Windows and then later on in Linux.
The creative content software that is usu
Video Lan Media Center? Avid? Bad Achronym. (Score:2)
That's what I read when I read VLMC. MC is a bad acronym. It's also is potentially in conflict with Avid Media Composer (MC) which is an editing application.
Time to go back to the drawing board on that name.
Looks promising (Score:1)
This is exactly what both Windows and Linux needs right now.
In Windows our only free choices apart from the crippled Windows Movie Maker (limited in too many ways) are nightmarish utilities or trial versions of payware (like VideoPad).
In Linux there are certainly projects out there, but they either seem to have stalled in development, been abandoned, crash all the time, or we're waiting oh-so-patiently for v1.0 to arrive.
This new VLMC looks like it should really hit the spot. They have a YouTube page with t
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We have enough linear and crappy non linear editors.
We do? Linear video editing died with videotape and the advent of computer-based editing. Pretty much every computer-based editing system is non-linear, perhaps with the exception of those used for live TV, but even those systems are also capable of non-linear work, and are only used in a linear fashion because Live TV is, well, linear.
Can you point me to this multitude of linear editors which are still being released today?