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Two Steps Forward for Linux Multimedia
chill writes: "A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was pulled from release with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability. Anyway, the successor to that program, called Cinelerra, is now available in beta form. Give it a shot and see what is what." And Dominic Mazzoni writes: "Talk about a tough act to follow. On the same day that Mozilla 1.0 was released last week, we released version 1.0.0 of Audacity, our GPL cross-platform audio editor that has been under development for nearly three years. It is based on wxWindows and runs natively on Linux (of course!), Windows, Mac OS (both 9 and X), and some other POSIX systems. Version 1.0.0 just adds a couple of minor features and bug fixes, but it is basically stable and quite useful, though it has some limitations. In addition, we also released a snapshot of our unstable development branch as Audacity 1.1.0. This version adds support for 24-bit and 32-bit samples, automatic resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, and internationalization, plus it has many nifty new UI enhancements."
You can find the following on their Sourceforge development page:
= 16 4360
Posted By: heroines
Date: 2002-03-27 14:59
Summary:Switch to windows
There's been ever increasing pressure to drop Linux and move everything to Windows. #1 developing desktop applications for what industry increasingly pushes as an embedded operating system is a bad career move. #2 for $60 you can run win32 programs on Windows or Linux natively. The $300 for VMWare didn't fly with users. The $200 for a full Windows license was still too expensive. The $0 for wine wasn't worth the crashes.
By setting the $60 price point, Codeweavers is finally making windows a better development model than Unix more than any technical decision could have.
- end quote
That can be found at:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id
Another poster pointed out that the source tarball contains the libraries of some 10 other OS projects. These include things like lame and libogg. Their previous product bcast2000 used it's own (ugly) widget set as well. We're probably fortunate that this NLE works as well as it does and is polished as it is.
It's hard for me to fathom just where these guys are coming from. Their methodology seems to suggest that they are talented Windows developers who don't even remotely get how UNIX works. They spring this NLE on us almost fully grown and then abruptly pull it because of some shadowy "liability" concern. They then spring its successor on us and are threatening to take it to Windows. There is also an announcement of an upcoming beta on their page where they point out that "it is STILL a native Linux program and won'
t take advantage of "win32 features".
I won't be in the least optimistic about this project's long term Linux prospects until I see a credible UNIX focused fork. These guys are good and wrote some nice software in spite of themselves but as far as their UNIX support goes they're flighty.
About cinelerra: As I understand it, the author of broadcast 2000 (which is the same as cinelerra) had an agreement with a company that packaged broadcast 2000 and sold it with support. At some point it appears someone threathened to sue the author, and he withdrew the project.
You can still find the sources to broadcast 2000 on the internet (I even think it is part of the cinelerra sources) and there is also a patch floating around that adds ogg vorbis and openDivx support to it.
Its about a month since I last checked out Cinelerra. At that point it was rather complicated to build - the makefile has errors that will allow the build process to fail but will make it appear to the user that it went OK. When built, it does work, but it is limited in its supports of Video encodings, which is a shame. The DV import module crashed for me, which means that I would have to convert all my DV streams to MPEG2 or MOV format, which is not so great. If you wish, however, the mjpegtools can be used for this.
Cinelerra has a number of transitions etc, which is great. However, a month ago, there were many glitches, and in general the program did not seem stable.
Several people mentioned MainActor. This program works well (for me) and the demo edition will work for as long as you wish, although it will print "MainActor" on any frame rendered by the program. (Read: If you do not manipulate the individual frames, you can actually edit all that you want, but transitions will have the stamp and so on). It does cost money though, and is not OSS. MainActor also have support for text effects, titles and so on. (Which I have not seen on any other Video editor for Linux).
If you are taking up video editing on Linux and you have a DV camera, you should definitively check out Kino. (at sourceforge). Disclaimer: I recently got cvs write access to kino. Kino is build for DV editing, and will keep the DV metainformation, etc, while editing. It has a nice interface - both menus, toolbars and vi style keyboard shotcuts. But, there are currently no support for transitions, titles, or anything like that. Kino cvs, which currently depends on libdv cvs, contains a module called "dvscript" that can be used to create some simple transitions, as well as streams from pngs, etc. I believe it is the plan to eventually integrate this functionality into kino proper.
If you are taking up editing, but mostly with analog video, you shold consider buying an analog to DV converter (An external box that works with Linux costs about $199 + a firewire card). In any case you also want the mjpegtools (sourceforge) to be able to work with captured streams, remove noise, constructs streams that can be used for videoDC's etc. Mjpegtools also support some hardware accelerated capture cards and jpeg compressors.
Kino can export a playlist to a format the mjpegtools can read, which means that it is easy to create e.g. mpeg2 or DivX streams from your DV input.
For your VideoCD creation needs, check out vcdimager.org.
Mads Bondo Dydensborg