Hi,

I am looking at rolling out Linux as a part of a dual boot system for our students next year. I have been tinkering a long time and have a pretty good feel about it all. Over the past 12 months, I have downloaded and trialed a whole heap of distros to help make my choice. One thing that I have stumbled on each time is video editing, in particualr KDenlive. I have installed Kdenlive on about 7 different distros and on a variety of hardware, followed all the guides and recommendations but I have had nothing but issues with it. The main issue is that Kdenlive locks up while previewing. I have disabled Compiz and tried a whole variety of things but had little success. I know it must be me, there is a whole community using Kdenlive and the forums are filled with positve things, after all Kdenlive has so many features in it, why would somebody invest time into all these features without getting it stable on the simple things first?

So can somebody tell me a platform/distro on which it just works out of the box?


Thanks

Could you tell me what distros you have used. I'm using Trisquel 3.0 and I have also tried Kdenlive on Ubuntu 9.04 I should probably work on Ubuntu 9.10

Sorry I had to delete my post. This forum doesn't like long linux command line code with http in it.

Tried Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, 9.10 [kde and gnome] . Opensuse 11.1, Fedora 11, mandriva.

Kdenlive locks up during previewing for me too, but in my opinion it's most likely an mlt problem, probably in the SDL plugin for mlt. I filed a bug report.

http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=1267

What hardware do you have? for example amount of ram, cpu speed,how old your computer is

I have pulseaudio installed in my computer and audio has been working fine with apps such Totem, VLC, mplayer, Firefox for quite a while. Today I noticed that for some reason I had package libsdl1.2debian-alsa installed. So I decided to install package libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio instead to see if it would help with kdenlive. Guess what, it did. Kdenlive no longer appears to lock up during playback. I have been editing a project that uses AVCHD video for a couple of hours with frequent project playbacks and not a single lock up so far. Before, it was lock up every few minutes if I was foolish enough to attempt playing the project.

Note however that the audio doesn't play well in kdenlive at the moment, but that is preferable to having to force kill kdenlive every few minutes.

I run Ubuntu 9.04 on a 2.4GHz Core2Duo laptop with 3 GB RAM, GeForce 8600m GT.

Thanks. You have just refreshed my mind and I meant to bring it up in the original post. The video lock is nothing to do with Compiz or video it is purely sound related. When I manually set the sound preference and KDenlive can't find that sound driver, KDenlive just works, no lockup, no hanging or jittering. I nothiced this last week on Ubuntu Karmic Koala, I assumed that Kdenlive doesn't like pulse. Having said that I could get kdenlive to talk to any other sound drivers. I really want to get this going because I like what I see, I just can't get it all to work.

For openSUSE maybe you can try this http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/multimedia/416735-how-safely-remove-disable-pulse-audio.html

It seems I missed this one

Changing library libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio instead of libsdl1.2debian-alsa fixed my sound issue and also my playback.

I thought I had read the forum from cover to cover and then I find this everywhere, sorry about that folks.

I use KDenlive 0.7.6 and used 0.7.5 too on Xubuntu 9.04 with pulseaudio
I never managed to get it worked as I want with ALSA (crash).

I solved some problems with this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578

Especially if the sound is stuttering:
http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=568#c4282