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Good News For Creating Quicktime On Linux

An anonymous reader writes "It's now possible to capture DV Quicktime files in Linux, splitting automatically at any predetermined size, and seamless importing the files to Windows (may be possible with Macs too but I don't have one to test with). The new version of Kino is out and it supports Quicktime." This requires that you specifically configure Kino to handle QuickTime, at least in this version. Read on below for a few notes about the submitter's experience with Kino, Cinelerra, Cinestream and other A/V editing tools.

"I've been finding Kino handy for capturing from VHS and Hi-8 because the auto-split avoids sync issues with large files. Cinestream (Windows NLE) can't seem to keep long captures in sync when I use my Sony DVMC-DA1 box but capturing in Kino has been a simple un-attended workaround. Now that it captures in Quicktime, it's even better because I can feed the Quicktime files directly to Cinestream with no pre-processing, and the quality is very good.

If you also install Cinelerra, you can also view some types of Quicktime in Linux. Cinelerra is an awesome multi-track NLE with several supplied effects/transitions/filters, but it also includes "X movie," which plays DV files captured with Cinestream as well as some other types (but nothing with Sorenson).

Both Cinelerra and Kino can open and edit Quicktime files from Cinestream.

Oh, what about audio? I've been trying a program called " Ardour" which is a real-time 24-track hard-disk recorder on Linux. Of course it's useful for "simpler" things too like a precision audio editor.

Check out the screenshots.

So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing (with nice interfaces too). And since it and the apps are free, that goes a long way. Microsoft said in a recent filing that it may be forced to lower prices due to competition from free software. Maybe one day the only people who pay for an editing package will be those who need support or buy it preconfigured with hardware."

23 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. what it can do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just in case it's already /. !

    Summary
    The latest version of Kino fixes a number of bugs while improving the user interface and adding support for Quicktime DV files and dv1394.

    Audio Encoding
    This release fixes a number of audio encoding issues, which also requires libdv version 0.99. Kino 0.6.3 will still use libdv 0.98, but libdv 0.99 is required to completely fix it. Movie projects with mixed audio formats work better now not only in FX. In addition, with mixed audio format projects, new resampling options in Export provides a more consistent stream to IEEE 1394 devices or DV output files.

    Audio Crossfade Effect
    Also, while speaking of audio, the FX/Audio/Transition/Switch has been changed to a Cross Fade with user-definable spline-based controls for the fade out of clip A and the fade in of clip B.

    dv1394
    This release adds support for dv1394. dv1394 is optional and is not the default for both capture and export. As a result, Preferences has changed quite a bit to accomodate this change. If you have previously had trouble exporting DV back to your camera because your camera did not accept the signal, then you should try dv1394. It reportedly works for nearly everyone where video1394 would not work. dv1394 is a new module in kernel 2.4.19 and later, or you can get it from Linux 1394 Subversion. A special new feature with dv1394 is a "Preview on external monitor" preferences display option. With this enabled, as you work in Edit or Trim, all video preview is also output using dv1394! Carefully, read the new dv1394 help page at http://www.linux1394.org/dv1394.html before attempting to use it.

    Quicktime
    The release also adds support for Quicktime DV that is compatible with Heroine Virtual's Broadcast 2000 or Cinelerra. This is native support meaning you can capture to it, edit it, and export it using Export/DV File. You must explicitly configure Kino for Quicktime using the --with-quicktime configure option.

    Capture
    A major bug affecting Capture and AV/C was located and fixed. Enabling AV/C would start a thread to poll for transport status and timecode. There was a bug in the timecode routine that can deadlock the thread. For some devices AV/C has not worked well. This was addressed partly with libavc1394 0.4.1 but Kino has made some improvements as well (including the above bugfix :-). One additional improvement, which seems to help, is the AV/C Poll Interval in preferences. The polling thread appears to be too intensive for some devices. The default is now 200ms, which is a fairly safe value, but you can try increasing it up to 999. On the other hand, my camera handles the lowest value of 10ms just fine. Also, now Kino waits for 3 failures to retrieve this information in a row before giving up and resetting the state of Kino's transport buttons.

    Eye Candy
    There is some nice new user interface features too. First, there is the More Info panel that expands to show detailed information about the file, video format, and audio format for the current frame. Second, in the scene strip on the left of the window, the current scene highlights. The previous two additions only work when timecode update is enabled, so if you are constrained on CPU power, you can leave all these things disabled for better performance although the overhead is very slight on and, for example, an AMD 800MHz shows no penalty. Third, there is a newly designed scrub bar and trim control. Finally, a convenient command reference window is available under the Help menu or by pressing Ctrl+F1.

    MPEG Export
    A cleanup option is added to Export/MPEG that is enabled by default. Disable the option to prevent the exporter from deleting temporary files in case mplex fails. Also, there is a bugfix to properly split into separate mpeg files for each scene--this option does not use mplex splitting, so this works very good for creating multiple chapter DVDs with dvdauthor.

    Jog/Shuttle Controller
    If you are a USB Jog/Shuttle user, then we now use the HID driver and not custom modules. We do not know if this works OK with the Sony controller. If you use the Sony controller, let us know. It it still easy to compile Kino for use with the custom modules. However, the HID driver works good with the Contour ShuttlePRO, loads nicely with hotplug, making this a more simple ready-to-use option for users.Using a shuttle controller in conjunction with the new Preview on External Monitor feature is very nice! Note that keymappings have changed some with the move to the HID driver; however, key mappings are now configurable in Preferences. One can press the key (combinations too!) on the controller with the dialog open to select it.

    FFMPEG Libavcodec
    If you are trying to use Kino on a PowerPC, you can try to enable FFMPEG libavcodec using the --with-avcodec options. The libavcodec DV decoder adds accelleration for PowerPC whereas libdv does not. See configure --help or the README for more information. We will not be embedding any libavcodec source code at this time to avoid any legal ramifications. Therefore, this option may be out of sync with the latest libavcodec API from time-to-time.

  2. mencoder could offer some quicktime support by narfbot · · Score: 5, Informative

    From v0.90pre2 changes: "experimental Sorenson 1/3 encoding (using quicktime DLLs) (only to AVI, and these files can only be played with MPlayer! It's needless to mail us about when will be MOV encoding too, as neither we know:) "

    Mencoder is part of MPlayer."

    It is not complete, but chances are you can encode/capture avi-ish Sorenson with Mencoder. This will probably work with most of the extra filters and encoding options to make changes the video. Seeing .mov support in other programs, I doubt finishing .mov support in Mencoder will take long.

    Although I bet linux still not that great for MOV editing/encoding, it's coming along quite nicely right now as you can see.

  3. Check out mplayer by RokaMoka · · Score: 2, Informative

    go to mplayerhq.hu

  4. you already can view Quicktime on Linux by halfelven · · Score: 5, Informative

    xinehq.de
    Install the latest beta, grab the Win32 codecs (ask on the mailing list if you're not sure where to get them from) and you're done. It can even do streaming, it has a Mozilla plugin...

  5. view Quicktime (and other media formats) on Linux by halfelven · · Score: 4, Informative

    xinehq.de
    You need the latest beta, and you have to also get the Win32 codecs (Quicktime included). If not sure where to get the Win32 codecs from, ask on the mailing list.
    It works fine, it can play streaming material. It even has a Mozilla plugin.
    And it's not just Quicktime, you can play basically any multimedia format: DivX, DVD, SVCD...

  6. Re:Quicktime on Linux - Mplayer by Edball · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can view them with Mplayer. Just get the required codecs. Quicktime, realplayer, win32, etc up at: http://ftp.lug.udel.edu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

  7. Re:playing Quicktime on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    One word :

    XMOVIE.

    Xmovie will let you play DV format Quicktime. I've downloaded some mpeg-4 Quicktime that also played in xmovie.

    Mplayer is really awesome and is supposed to play Sorenson encoded files but I haven't tried that.

  8. Broadcast Quality by cranos · · Score: 3, Informative

    AS someone working in a Regional TV station I would love to be able to switch our production facilities away from the MS based systems we are using now and move them to a Linux based system.

    I am starting to write something for this myself but I would like to know how close we are to actually achieving this aim. I have looked at several of the packages on offer such as KDENLIVE and Cinelerra but none of them are what I would call studio ready.

    Well I keep hoping.

  9. Re:Please make Quicktime for Windows :-) by Drakonian · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, it's Sorenson's codec, not Apple's. If you don't QuickTime player but just the codec, go bug Sorenson.

    --
    Random is the New Order.
  10. Xine win32 codecs by Edball · · Score: 2, Informative
  11. "auto-split" is why! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why this is good and different is that Kino has an auto-split feature that Cinelerra doesn't have. Also no truly good Windows non-linear-editors have this feature. So now, if you need to capture say a long VHS tape or even a DV tape where scene capture isn't appropriate, and you need to edit the files in Windows as well, you just pop in the tape, specify 2 GB files (16000 frames), point Kino at a FAT32 formatted drive, hit capture and go away for an hour or two and audio and video will be in perfect sync in all files, This is very difficult to get right with large file capture. It's also much easier to feed these Quicktime files to any Windows app that can edit Quicktime much easier than it is with Kino's AVI files, so this is a big deal at least until it's possible to more in Linux than Cinelerra can do now and especially for those of us who need to create cros-platform files,

  12. Kino experiences by The+Stranger · · Score: 5, Informative

    Over the past several months, I've been using Kino to edit together a wedding video for my brother-in-law and his wife. I did the original filming with two cameras, so I had some extensive editing to do. Wanting to get away from Windows and the 4GB file size limit, I decided to explore Kino.

    After some work setting it up, everything worked surprisingly well. DV capture (from a Sony TRV-950) was painless and the editing went pretty smoothly. I ended up having to create a separate audio track to dub over the entire video. It was at that point that I discovered a bug in Kino's dubbing feature. Because of the way audio was handled, there was a progressive desynchronization of the audio and video. The good news is that after posting some messages on their forum, the issue got fixed in the CVS (and I presume the new version incorporates the fix).

    I've been exporting the finished product (several gigs of DV) to VCD, and the results have been very satisfactory. All in all, anyone who wants to try editing DV video in Linux should at least give Kino a good try- the interface is clean and relatively intuitive and I was able to figure things out without a lot of trouble. Before using Kino, my only experience had been a little work with Pinnacle Studio 7.0.

    1. Re:Kino experiences by captaineo · · Score: 2, Informative

      You might brag to them that the Linux DV system is much less likely to drop frames during FireWire capture or plaback (as long as you're using my dv1394 driver)... dv1394 is designed so that even if it drops a frame, which is unlikely with a properly-written player, the application can notify you immediately - so you can be sure your tapes come out looking good without having to check them over manually...

  13. 4GB file limit long fixed by benwaggoner · · Score: 2, Informative

    The 4GB file limit was fixed in Windows back with NTSF and NT workstation. You're probably runnine ME, or have a FAT32 formatted drive.

  14. Re:quicktime?? by adamhupp · · Score: 2, Informative

    Xvid is an MPEG-4 codec. Quicktime is a stream format. You could, theoretically, put an xvid encoded video into a quicktime file.

    -Adam

  15. Xine and GStreamer comparison by halfelven · · Score: 2, Informative


    Apparently KDE decided to do with xine what Gnome wants to do with GStreamer: a multimedia player infrastructure. Want your foo-bar KDE/Gnome application to play DivX? Just make the appropriate calls to the xine/GStreamer API on your system.
    GStreamer seems to be more ambitious towards video broadcast and stream video. But it's not quite ready yet for prime time (still feeling kinda alpha version).
    OTOH, xine is already production quality, has a working player and started to develop a video editing infrastructure.

    It will be interesting to watch how these projects evolve in the future. Both have interesting features, and have a promising look.

  16. Re:Why is this `good news` ? by JDWTopGuy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Helloo... We're talking about DV in a quicktime wrapper. Quicktime is a wrapper format, not a codec. DV is a codec, and theforce.net is not using DV.

    IIRC, theforce.net is using either H.263 or Sorenson @ 320x240 at a relatively low bitrate. DV has a way higher constant bitrate (3.9Mbps?) and it's at 720x480 (ie the same size as DVD video).

    The point is, if you have DV video it doesn't make any difference what wrapper format it's in because the quality is the same.

    --
    Ron Paul 2012
  17. Re:Why the fuck by yomegaman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Quicktime has always been a completely open format, and is the industry standard for editing tools. Programs like xanim could open and play Quicktime since many years ago. Now, the Sorenson codec is proprietary, but if you're making your own video just don't use it. You'll want to keep the video in DV format anyway while you're editing, then at the end export it into any format you want. What is it with you guys, you act like the whole world revolves around surfing the web on your Linux box downloading LOTR trailers. Somebody makes those videos you know, and for them Quicktime is great. Stop all the hating.

    --
    ...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
  18. Re:Linux FUD by amsr · · Score: 2, Informative

    The fact is that most people don't understand quicktime, and thats why we get all these useless posts that it is quicktime's fault that linux users can't play sorenson encoded video.

  19. shut up about DivX! by Kz · · Score: 3, Informative

    To all of the above posters saying things like "why QuickTime when {DivX | MPEG4 | Ogg Tarkin | AVI} is so much {better | smaller | easier | open} ?" I'll tell you two things:

    1: When editing video you want the LEAST compression possible. BIG files are a PLUS. That's why this guy uses DV encoded files, it's the same compression done by his camera, so he loses nothing while capturing and editing.

    2: QuickTime isn't a compression, not even a file format, it's a software architecture. When he picked his camera, the choice of compression was made for him (DV), and when he chose the NLE (Cinestream), the file format was fixed (mov, quicktime's native format)

    This isn't about viewing video clips on the 'net, for that he'd reencode as MPEG4 after having his master tape.

    --
    -Kz-
  20. Not for analog video by Trogre · · Score: 2, Informative

    It should be noted that Kino is only good for capturing/editing pure digital video streams.

    Analog sources such as those supported by Video4Linux are not supported.
    There is a V4L tab in Kino, but it is highly experimental.

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  21. My experiences with Kino... by Nice2Cats · · Score: 2, Informative
    ...have been very good so far (up and to Kino 6.1), my experiences with Cinellera have been horrible.

    Kino is still missing the (in layman's terms) "parallel track" view of more than one video track that will let you to move stuff from one track to the other with the flick of the mouse; the problem is trying to do an "L"-cut (sound from frame A continues into frame B for a while) with Kino. Once that is taken care of, you will be able to do the most basic forms of editing with no problem.

    This is still no match for the stupidest Windows programs out there -- video just isn't there yet on Linux -- but given that Cinellera crashes about once every ten minutes, Kino looks like our best hope so far to at least get something done.

  22. DV and Mandrake by madsdyd · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, you can _almost_ do what you want. With Kino installed, you can plug in your DV cam and start editing away to your hearts content.

    I don't know if it is possibly to add icons automagically, but I guess it would be. No idea how to do it though?

    Mads Bondo Dydensborg