I have a project where I'm doing a video of game battle report. Basically it has 4 tracks. One for video (which is muted), one for still images, one for voice and one for background. I had done one video almost to finish and added the background sounds. However after closing it failed to reopen again. Giving following error:

Cannot open the project file, error is:
unexpected character
Do you want to open a backup file?

However the backup list is empty. It was some work to make the voice match the videos (which are partially cut and speeded up) and I really don't want to redo everything. How can I fix the "unexpected character" and get the project to open again? The voice and background are ogg files. Images are either jpeg or xcf files. Video is mov. None of the file names have odd characters or spaces in names.

I'm using Kdenlive 0.9.4 and KDE 4.9.5 with Kubuntu 12.10.

Thanks,

This is known issue http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=3003 and is apparently fixed in version 0.9.6

That mantis describes this workaround

WORK AROUND FIX:
1. Open the attached MP3 file on Audacity;
2. Go File -> Export | Then give a name for the output file
3. A Metadata window will popup. Delete all the metadata.

The two background tracks had worked before, but on the safe side I removed the metadata tags from them. Rest of the voice files didn't have any tags. I still get the same error.

Bummer. Well I guess you could try and install 0.9.6.

Which I guess you would need to compile yourself.
See http://kdenlive.org/download-development#script

I am still waiting for https://launchpad.net/~sunab/+archive/kdenlive-release to get updated to 0.9.6

Someone should double what we pay Sunab for maintaining the PPA for kdenlive so he can get 0.9.6 built for us. ;-)

IT'S ALIVE!

Ok, I got the nightly build from the devel page. I used that to load it -> failure. However instead of saying just unexpected character it told me line and character. After looking at the .kdenlive project file I realised that it is just xml file. So going to check the line it was complaining about, I found an error.



In there is two errors (which I changed to whats below):
meta.attr.0.stream.BPM (BEATS PER MINUTE)="110"
--> meta.attr.0.stream.BPM="110"
meta.attr.0.stream.INITIAL KEY="C"
--> meta.attr.0.stream.INITIAL_KEY="C"

After doing this, it works!

Thanks for pointing out the never version which gave me an error that I could use to fix the issue :).

Well that is good. But it would appear that you have a different bug or that the previous one was not actually fixed.

Or maybe the fix was that it prevented writing project files with faulty XML.

If the issue persists you should file an new defect.

I did a new project with the devel version and checked the xml file. It is done differently and is working. I think the fix done to the MP3 issue also fixes this.