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Good News For Creating Quicktime On Linux
"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.
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."
With the existance of DivX, Xiph.org and many others.
Not saying there aren't any, but I have yet to see a QuickTime video that matches the quality of some of the other formats. A visit to TheForce.net has given me this opinion.
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Since Apple failed miserably with giving us a decent movie player. I'd be much happier if Quicktime was given to us as a normal codec "plugin" so they could be played with WMP or just about any other movie player for Windows.
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...if this sounds like a rather open ended question, but we have MPlayer playing pretty much any a/v codec on the planet right now, and we have decent video tools (esp. Cinelerra). What's stopping people getting together to make it possible for all the codecs being used universally?
ie- So that you're able to open sorenson encoded files seamlessly in cinelerra, and encode/save out to various divx mutations.
Come on people, we're so close!
I unserstand that libavcodec does this with many files (mpeg derivatives), but not the *ahem* less legal ones.
I can't wait until the day I plug a Firewire dv cam into a mandrake box, a dv cam icon pops up on the desktop and allows joe to edit away to his heart's content.
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Does anyone else think that Apple is going to shit a brick over this? I'm sure they don't mind Linux users being able to view Sorenson encoded files because they arn't really loosing anything, Linux users just otherwise wouldn't view these files. But now people have an option to make quicktime moves without paying for Apple software. (I'm saying this assuming that Apple dosen't make any free Sorenson encoding programs)
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Actually, QuickTime the file format is completely documented and open.
Apple's implementation is propritary, as are some of the codecs. But as a file format, it is radically better than AVI for doing media authoring.
An open source implementation would be good forever.
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is quicktime the prefered format for video? i prefer Xvid(open source, high quality, high compression).
its very nice to have so many options available, especially on linux now. i have been using crossover plugin to play quicktime movies on my linux box but now ill be able to play them native.
good work.
mainconcpet (http://www.mainconcept.com) has been working on the linux port of their editor for a while now. The RC1 of their windows version is out, you might want to check it out. We use the windows version in production for 11 regional channels
It uses mplayer to open video files, so anything that mplayer can open, LiVES will let you edit.
Would anyone want to make quicktime videos on linux when there are much better OPEN codecs and containers (xvid/vorbis for video and audio, and ogg or even avi for the container)? I mean, the quicktime container and it's codecs (sorenson etc) are some of the most proprietary, least-supported media formats in existance! (except maybe realmedia). There are no good, simple "user" players for quicktime on linux ("user" meaning the user doesn't have to compile a bleeding-edge mplayer or xine and somehow make his/her probably illegally-obtained win32 codec dlls work with it), and the quicktime player on windows is horrendously ugly, slow and feature-crippled compared to all the free/open media players (and even WMP).
I just got kino running under Debian 3.0. It was a bit of a booger. Needed to upgrade to testing, then update the DVlib to an unstable version. Now, it works beautifully.
I was able to show of with pride to my Mac coworkers who work with Final Cut Pro. They were impressed that I got DV working under GNU/Linux, but couldn't understand why I went to the trouble when FCP runs so well on Mac OS X.
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I used Quicktime 4 as a porting layer to convert 7 man-years of Macintosh code to Windows 98. You can see some info and screenshots of the working application (a color pallette, and a layout for a school placement test)here.
This was a wild, unsupported, dumb, nervewracking adventure that taught me a lot about Quicktime (which has of course continued to grow and is may be a different cat with Mac OS X for all I know). When it worked well (when the libraries really existed, not just saying they were there) huge chunks of code would just start working which was also fun.
Quicktime for Windows brought a lot of the Macintosh toolbox calls, things you would think are part of the Mac OS, into Windows so you could call a huge number of them and they would work just like the Apple documentation said. I was able to use the Mac resource files after hacking some endian things and the Quicktime fonts looked much better than the Windows functions then too.
Anyway it was amazing how Quicktime appeared to be a trojan to put half the MacOS into Windows but I guess Quicktime needed it all. If it was rewritten to run on BSD maybe we could enjoy Quicktime as a programming paradigm in Linux too.
Since the software I was porting was a cross between Quark XPress and Adobe Illustrator (VXAStar, a layout program for "Shashoku" traditional analog printing press companies in Japan) it didn't need it but I even had a thing that could play movies in it. Quicktime is great because it was a whole integrated way of thinking about any kind of media, it was an API written by thoughtful people. So the API included things like knowledge about different color spaces, new audio codecs that might come out, and so on. So if your app would support Quicktime you could handle professional quality data (close to a megabyte per frame) or anything else.
I haven't done programming for Linux video or Quicktime recently either so I don't know and most likely things have changed though I still have a copy of some of heroinewarrior's first stuff :), so I don't mean to disparage anything that may be out there. But I was developing this software while in a small NLE studio, a guy who had built his own Mac-based finicky NLE suite with an external RAID array.
If you want to encode Sorenson for the web, we just need to be able to buy a Sorenson codec binary for linux.
If you want to do studio work you probably will have a standalone system which is only used for that, with maybe hard disks partitioned with big blocks. The Mac (Premiere) system I saw was immensely powerful, like a Quantum Paintbox you could do photoshop or work in other programs then render it to disk, the biggest problems were:
1) explaining to the customer what is possible, since you could do anything even just with AfterEffects, like creating clouds from nothing or rendering video in lots of layers.
2) finickiness (don't install anything else on that machine and even so it might crash sometimes.. this was an 860AV I believe),
3) you need to buy/steal a betamax deck (though we dreamed of going to DV then) and the RAID could only hold so much,
4) rendering time was quick usually but you still had to provide a couch for the customer to fall asleep on at points (when many layers were used). Also
5) You must use a very expensive, very fragile video board to get professional-quality video into the machine, just knowing all about them is a whole field of study and detective work.
6) from a project I did last year I can tell you that using tapes from unknown sources is sheer hell and inevitably involves lots of cable swapping and signal testing. If DVD regionality and PAL/SECAM encoding can be handled through software (say write a DVD at the end of the session, though most places will want Pro DV tapes or Beta.. digital betacam being almost nonexistent in Japan) then you may see studios putting Linux boxes in the corner of the room for the "just in case" when you really need it.
Now we seem to be there completely hardware-wise, but I doubt a linux software suite could be put together that could do as much yet (though maybe the film gimp would give AfterEffects a run for the money, I haven't tried it). It is completely conceivable that you could get pretty far with a few RAID arrays, a fast machine with tons of memory, and a pro DV deck. Maybe everyone is still buying avids but if analog starts working watch out!
As I'm writing this I am sitting on 20 hours of DVCAM tapes and thinking about how to get an editting system set up.. to produce a few professional-quality tapes for sale. At the moment I am thinking of getting a small pro DV deck and dumping them into a couple of hard disks first, then trying out the software mentioned in this post. If anyone has any recommendations (no special hardware, I'll just at the end either print to another DV or DVD and from there to a Beta deck at a lab) I'd be grateful.
Matt