This is a really new beginners question, since I just installed Kdenlive (much thanks to what I read on this site).

The first thing I wanted to try was to edit an avi-film (that was originally captured with MS Moviemaker). To my big surprise the program don't seem to find the avi file at all. I therefore tried to browse to the file an choose open with Kdenlive... but I only got this error message "error occurred while parsing element"

So what is wrong? I testet with Kino and everything worked perfectly, but from what I've seen I'd rather work with Kdenlive than Kino.

I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty and installed Kdenlive from “Add/remove..” and it's version 0.73

Probably I just missed something basic, but I can't find out what it is. I've been searching around but can't find that any other new beginner got this kind of problems.

Maybe you're missing the necessary codecs? Make sure you have them installed. The relevant packages are:
libavcodec-unstripped-51 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 libavutil-unstripped-49 libpostproc-unstripped-51 libswscale-unstripped-0
If they're not installed, use Synaptic to get them. You won't find them in the "Add/Remove..." tool (I guess).

Thanks for your reply.

Here's the deal. I have all of the packages installed according to Synaptic – but not the unstripped versions. Does this matter? Since I'm pretty new in the Linux world I get a bit nervous when Ubuntu pretty much tells me that I'm going to install an unrestricted package and that the other one is to be removed.

No danger in proceeding?

No luck. I changed everything to the unstripped versions, but it's all the same. Any other ideas?

Why can Kino open and edit but not Kdenlive? It looks to me that something is missing in the program.

i don't think you can "open" a video file with kdenlive
you have to import it inside a project

Thanks, of course you're right. When I started a new project I could “import” the avi file.

Now the catch is that Kdenlive is maybe not the software I was looking for. I would like something more like Moviemaker (but better) to convince my wife that we don't need windows, but so far I think Kino does a better job in this part – at least with already extracted films that are rendered to avi format. But still not good.

I need a program that easily will show me the clips and let me rearrange them according to recording date or whatever. So far I have not been able to do this in either Kdenlive or Kino.

Maybe I just have to keep on looking, but at least now I now how to reach an avi-file.

Very probably, but the usual way to deal with these things is to let the post die rather than bring a dead thread from 2009 back up for absolutely no good reason. Its common for posters not to notice the date and post in to it.

Most people will assume a 3 year old issue is solved and maybe the poster is no longer about anyway. So best not dig up old threads to ask if the problems fixed. We'd all assume it had been.