I have a 16-minute avi file that uses H.264. When I load it in kdenlive, even if I seek through it from the beginning to the end, it is only moving a few frames in the monitor panel (it happens both in the clip monitor and in the project monitor). I tried converting the clip to xvid and also mpeg2, but the problem remains exactly the same. I'm using kdenlive 0.9.2

Did you also try to transcode the clip to DNxHD?
There is also "Remux with MKV", it helped me to fix up a clip once.

Sorry, I don't really know what you're talking about

dode wrote:Did you also try to transcode the clip to DNxHD?.

Never heard of DNxHD, why should I need to transcode to anything?

There is also "Remux with MKV", it helped me to fix up a clip once.

Where is that? And why should I need to do that?
It is supposed to just work in kdenlive, no matter the format.

Some codecs like H.264 require quite some CPU power to decode because they are highly compressed and are not suitable for video editing.
One way is to transcode such clips to some intermediate format first so they can be smoothly edited. I think it is quite common to video editing tools. DNxHD is such an intermediate format codec developed by Avid and kdenlive supports it as well.

If you right-click on a clip in kdenlive, you have a menu entry "Transcode", from that you can choose a resolution and frame rate matching the clip and the desired bitrate. Transcoding to DNxHD is pretty fast I think, there is virtually no quality loss and editing is very smooth.

Another way is to use proxy clips.

"Remux with MKV" can also be found under "Transcode" in the context menu of a video clip. It is just a guess, like I said, it helped me once to fix up a video clip that didn't play well.

dode wrote:Some codecs like H.264 require quite some CPU power to decode because they are highly compressed and are not suitable for video editing.

I would expect that to slow things down, not to break things.

If you right-click on a clip in kdenlive, you have a menu entry "Transcode"

Thanks, I was not aware of those features.

from that you can choose a resolution and frame rate matching the clip and the desired bitrate.

Actually it didn't have my desired settings, but it let me edit the parameters afterwards

Transcoding to DNxHD is pretty fast I think

It seems to take some time, it just shows "1 job" and nothing else, how can I check the progress?

aditsu wrote:It seems to take some time, it just shows "1 job" and nothing else, how can I check the progress?

I figured it out, there was a tiny progress bar over the thumbnail in the project tree. The converted file is quite huge, but it seems to seek properly. Thanks for the help.

aditsu wrote:I would expect that to slow things down, not to break things.

Agree, the reason that it breaks may be your relatively old kdenlive version, in the latest version it is maybe just slow.

aditsu wrote:The converted file is quite huge

Yes, it is a disadvantage of transcoding. Proxy clips are small, but I think to create them takes about as long as transcoding a clip.