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Free Realtime Video Editing for Linux
paRcat writes "Broadcast 2000 Final has been released. To those that are into realtime 640x480 video editing, this is good. It's an awesome package, and all free! Here's the link." Has anybody out there tried this yet? It sounds great, but so far we haven't been able to dig up anyone who's actually worked with this software to get their take on it.
Without having looked at it, let me ask... how does it deal with codecs? Does it come with a set bundled, or do you have to add codecs like with xanim? What codecs are included?
--JT
In the "Readme.src" file...
:P)
----SNIP-----
This source tree is for reference and posterity purposes, and possibly
MMX. There is no support for building the source code. You should
have already run the binary and decided Broadcast 2000 does something
that you really want to do on a Linux box. If you can't build it, you
should be doing other things as regards your GPA.
----SNIP----
And sure enough, there was just a make file, no configure script (which is when alarm bells start going through my head). I started compiling from the top level directory, and it stopped at
jpeg.c: In function `quicktime_read_markers_jpeg':
jpeg.c:209: `jpeg_saved_marker_ptr' undeclared (first use in this function)
jpeg.c:209: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once)
Which is not exactly an error caused by misconfiguration in the make files. I'll start
going through that code now...
I hope what he put there was another one of his "jokes", because that kind of attitude really sucks. The programmer should ALWAYS provide a good build system. It takes VERY little time to do if you know how all the code is supposed to fit together. It is MUCH harder (and wasted time), for a prospective user to do the same.
If I run into a lot of annoying configuration problems, I'll write my own damn autoconf file for this code, and release it on a web page (since the author has little interest in including it in his package
Building the code should not be made artificially difficult. You're not going to get rid of the losers in that way (the losers will all be screaming about RPM's (I am not implying that everyone who uses RPM's are losers)), but you are
going to annoy the prospective programmers who are going to have to go through the code and reconstruct what you already KNOW. In my opinion, a sloppy build system is the product of sloppy programmers.
I have followed the Broadcast 2000 development for a while, and I am both impressed by and thankful for their work. The drivers appear to be the missing link. Unfortunately, on the Broadcast 2000 page, they skip the issue of drivers, simply saying that any "Video4Linux" drivers will work, without so much as providing a link to a Video4Linux project page.
At least it's a good sign that they're sticking to a standard, rather than creating their own drivers. Unfortunately, the driver situation seems to be quite a mess. There's Video4Linux, Video4Linux 2, LiViD, and other projects and I'm not sure how they're related. Most of them seem to support mostly TV-in-a-window cards rather than full-motion video capture.
It looks like work on the Matrox Marvel drivers is coming along, which is good for me because I just bought an Athlon 550 and Matrox Marvel G400-TV! >geek gloatCineGX which seems to have disappeared. The idea was to create a framework for handling video, applying filters and codecs in a pipelike fashion. That would mean that you could, say, stream an AVI file from your disk, and show it as a picture within a live TV feed, showing it on the screen and spitting it into an MPEG2 file on disk all at the same time (provided you have enough processing power and/or hardware assistance). Most editing could be reduced to problems of mixing and matching streams and filters. The editing GUI would exist only to provide a project management function.
They're just pointing out that it's not a perfect product, that's all.
:)
If you'll read the news section, you'll see that these people put their heart and soul into this project. (and sunk a good deal of money in it, too.) After releasing a preliminary version to see if anyone was interested, and seeing that it wasn't quite so hot of a market as they thought, they decided to instead release it GPLed to the public.
It's not vapourware; I'm using it right now on my system. And from what I've seen so far, it looks very nice. Clean interface, highly configurable, standard interface design, lightening fast toolkit, plugin support, etc. Plus it comes with source! Sweet!
This is the product I've been waiting for.
(I just wish my ATi TV tuner had a video4linux driver, so I could really test this puppy out. Could someone test out it's performance for us with a supported card, and tell us how it performs? It'd be neat to know how well it captures--whether or not it drops frames, and stuff like that.)
James
I'm so lost it's not even funny.
I have a very simple need:
1) Load software from camcorder
2) Edit (resequence)
3) Record back onto tape
Coincidentally I found this software (again) on the morning of it's release. I was ecstatic.
Then I looked around to figure out what card to buy. Clearly it needs TV in AND TV out.
Well, I can't find a SINGLE FREAKING CARD ANYWHERE that:
1) Support TV out
2) under Linux
3) today
Does ANYONE know of ANY CARD that meets these conditions?
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
This is real.
Here is a link of me using it. http://thunklife.com/bc2k.jpeg
It seems like half of us have sence. And look, im not posting anonymous.
This software is top notch. I'm using it to edit a documentary about Linux. Go to the site to download some clips and see what bcast2000 is capable of producing.
----
I mean, if we're going to have a million TV stations on the internet running out of people's homes, we have to have a way for those people to edit their shows, right?
Avid (makers of $100K non-linear editor systems) better watch its ass. I knew this kind of thing was an inevitability, but didn't realize it would be available so soon.
Here are some other links to similar projects:
http://www.geocities. com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/6309/index.html - the Free Film Project
Freefilm.linuxbox.com - not up yet, but coming
Of course the big players now in this industry are Avid (with the Media Composer, Film composer, Digidesign (Protools), etc.), Media 100, and Adobe (who has Premiere 5.x). If this actually exists, man, that would be great!
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Now I can make commerical quality p0rn at home with my Linux box (No pun intended!). I just bet this is what Linus was thinking when he started making Linux!
However, on a serious note, this is cool. Now if I could get Quake3 to give me a serious Frame Rate, I would *finally* be happy.
Linux O Muerte!
If Jean Louis were to follow the pack and go with digital democracy, open-sourcing the BeOS could push this sort of thing into overdrive. To combine the digital media capabilities with the most peer-reviewed OS around has got to be a great thing.
Until that time, Linux should probably focus on building market share by improving the Gimp and developing a strong vector graphics app to compete with the main 2 commercial OSes. Only by gaining a market share by slowly building people's confidence in the product can attract the proper attention. Otherwise, you'll get Joe Hollywood-Wannabe trying this system out, and finding the man pages way too convoluted to follow. Video editing for Linux will gain a bad rap and go by the wayside, unfortunately crippling an otherwise fat-potential business within the next handfil of years.
By the way, aside from pure evolution - what kinds of long-term goals do the Linux community forsee?
- passion
This is real. I have used this, it works well. If your not going to download it that is fine. But it is real. I am running it on my Pentium 200 mmx (not a PII). With a SB16 kernel driver. No OSS-Comercial.
I am not using the Video features, just the Audio. For Audio it is the fastest editor for Linux.
If you are still a sceptic, but want to believe. Check out freshmeat.
Look up the previos version Broadcast on the net.
This is real, I guess you nay-sayers just don't have faith in Open Source -- or know what it means.
I've been working on a GPL'd video editor for unix for sometime now.
I'm looking for people willing to help with the project.
http://www.crow.atu.com.au
Eric
I downloaded the Binary version of this early this morning. Very Impressed. I had played with a Beta, this is much better. Just the nonlinear sound editing capabilities alone are unmached in Linux or GPL software -- let-alone the video. This version has support for any sound card supported by the kernel, the previos version Broadcast. This is a major leap in the Field of MultiMedia for Linux. As well as the buz in the SoundStudio mailing list. Personaly I had a fear this would not be GPL, as this was a major project, and it was not GPL in the BETAs. In fact the BETAs I saw had timebombs in them, they would expire.