Hi.

Unfortunately I have old hardware, and having used kdenlive about 9 months ago (with lots of crashes) I decided to install it again, along with creating a linux setup. Kdenlive installed finally, only it can't create proxy clips. Then after taking the dogs for a walk, and searching the forum a bit for a solution, kdenlive crashes without me touching anything. WTF!!!!

So which version of kdenlive is solid? With which distro should I pair it to be solid? Is there a solid combination?

I installed LinuxMint XFCE 13 Maya.
Kdenlive 0.9.2

And my system info is:
Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz
2048 KB L2 cache
4GB DDR2 RAM
32 bit system
Intel Modbile 945GM Express video card

I am using Archlinux (rolling release, always in sync with latest (Kdenlive) releases) and have no troubles, but I am not a heavy user (usually mp2g2 material, no proxies, no fancy gimmicks, just some effects and transitions and render to h.264 or mpeg4 codec).

Before Arch I have been using openSuse and Kdenlive from the links2linux packman repo and everything was fine.

Ubuntu users here are convenient with Kdenlive from the sunap ppa in combination with packages from an extra repository.

You will find some more information with the forum search - this question has been asked a couple of times, especially how to set up a working video editing suite on ubuntuish distros.

Non of them in my experience, the well worn saying your mileage may vary, but it'll also depend on source files, hardware, complexity and a lot of other factors. But crashing is going to happen and probably at the least expected moment.

But to offset that kdenlive offers to me some surprising features compared to many apps, like project recovery on restart, backups and autosaves, not trying to suggest that its a solution, crashing is damn annoying but those features help.

How did you install 0.9.2 on Linux Mint, from a PPA or build script, the only two ways I'd recommend if it's not in the repos. It's odd you can't create proxies, have you tried custom proxy option?

If you don't want crashes and more of your WTF!! moments kdenlive ain't for you.

@ al25fps

Thanks for the reply. I'm not a heavy user either especially considering my hardware. I've looked at Arch for while now but I really am not a linux fundi and setting up Arch really seems like a 5 day thing for someone like me cause I'll have to figure out things before I'll know if I need them or not, and at this point I just want to be able to pick up the tool and start using it without the need to tweak it to get it to work.

Any pre-packaged Arch linux setups....maybe I should try my setup with Archbang....it'll just be another two days I spend just to be able to start editing a video file on a tool without crashes.

Thanks again for the direction, appreciated.

@yellow

I updated my repository...uhm.....source and installed via Software Manager. I remember the project recovery thing however with 8.1 it didn't actually recover my project, just opened it and crashed again.

Kdenlive should maybe look at the Lightworks business model (my hardware is to old for it), mind you I think that there are a ton of excellent linux software programs that can only benefit and become serious market leaders with such a model.

Anyway, I just want to edit a few simple projects in an NLE...my best solution is new gear.

Updated your repository, have you tried sunabs PPA either stable or unstable?

I used to use Gentoo years ago before Ubuntu arrived, recently looked at Arch and it too involved to be bothered with, thinking back to the amount of time spent trying to work with Gentoo building from scratch. I think Ubuntu based distros are fine.

Personally Lightworks is no business model that I think open source software should adopt, Lightworks is for those looking for a free lunch, most users there I'd suggest don't give a damn about open source, just free or cheap NLE.

Generating income for open source projects via crowd sourcing, Indigogo and donating members yes.

The business model, I assume you mean the license fee to generate income, is centered around the premise they say they have to pay license on codecs, so differentiate their 'products' and shift attention they omit a bit of hardware support, as well as codec related fps from the free version artificially, yes business, but not open source attitude.

I see no future in that model, we already have the Black Magic Camera shooting raw, the internet delivery codecs are minimal choices, online streaming is same choice, how many new proprietary codecs have appeared in recent years, how much of the LWKs demographic are shooting on XDCAM or whatever. The future is raw capture and a few becoming defacto delivery codec choices across all platforms and hardware.

They can keep it, whatever illustrious history it may have had. :-) Just my opinion.

Current version (0.9.2) is rock solid for me running on Linux Mint Maya 64 bit(Cinnamon Desktop). My computer hardware is around 30 months old and I have not faced any problem till now!

I just tried to do a project, twice. I created proxy clips via Handbrake (trying to figure out the ffmpeg command is too laborious - anyway, point is I created proxies manually).

I started kdenlive, created a new project, loaded the proxy clips, and merely browsing through the clips made kdenlive crash - twice. Trying to install the debug software also proved a brickwall.

@yellow
Sounds like you are doing a fair amount of video editing from that post regarding LWKS. You editing mainly in Kdenlive I presume? But this is an off topic discussion.

As for trying sunabs ppa either stable or unstable....you lost me sorry. I followed the repository procedure showed on the website to update and install kdenlive via the software manager. As for stable or unstable, maybe I have unstable cause kdenlive constantly crashes with me.

I'll try Openshot (haven't crashed during me playing around with it) for this edit, besides it is a simple concept edit anyway.

i am a fan of kdenlive nevertheless i know its limitations. i hope the refactoring will make it more stable to reduce the crashes and give us basic pro video editing tools.

i like that openshot is being constantly developed but it is for household editing, so is pitivi... the closest we get to pro in the foss world is cinelerra (if you manage to learn to deal with its peculiar ways and gui).

as fot distros i use archlinux for being lightweight if you think it is too difficult i would recommend avlinux. also use a lightweight window manager such as openbox or pekwm to spare your ram.

for me the best business model it that of blender, an industry standard tool with a great community behind it. if lightworks goes opensource i would definitely use it... although i would prefer lumiera to come to life or kdenlive become more reliable.

hi Inprogress, why create proxies manually? kdenlive will do it for you.

I do edit very regularly and that's with kdenlive + blender for comp nodes for color processing. I use kdenlive proxy feature and 99% of source is Canon DSLR h264. Which I first remux in MP4Box.

Usually end up editing on an old 64bit Sempron with 2GB ram Ubuntu 12.04. Blender comp nodes, tracker and such on a much better machine.

If you want to try sunabs repositories best just search the site or google, I don't have the link to hand.

Kdenlive keeps crashing on me, with manual proxy's or native (kdenlive proxy feature) proxy's. I can't even start a to edit.

But I have found my solution, I'm buying a new laptop just looking at some deals. Two reasons, I'm done struggling to get something to work when I could've spent the last two weeks editing, and I'd like to use Lightworks cause I paid for it. Who knows, maybe I'll be back with Kdenlive in a month.

Thanks all.

That's too bad about the crashes, see you around. Hope it works out for you.

I use Ubuntu since version 10.04. Since then I would like to make Ubuntu my primary system which I have succeeded to get for all my use cases (email, web, office, ...) except Video Editing. I really would like to use Kdenlive but all it does is to crash and crash and crash ...

I run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on different hardware: HP PC, Dell, and self-made Intel i7 based (i.e. different CPU & different graphic cards, RAM up to 4GB), and Kdenlive is installed from the Ubuntu software center.

The video clips that I would like to edit come from a Panasonic SD90 camcorder and are in MTS (AVCHD) format. The clips are short (less than a few minutes). Kdenlive correctly recognizes the clip properties. Kdenlive may work for a set of approx 10 clips but if I would like to edit/assemble a short holiday-worth of 500 clips it crashes when loading the clips and then Kdenlive is not able to recover from the crash (starts crashing again during recovery), so I can throw the project away. The clip at which Kdenlive crashes is random, i.e. it could the the 11th clip or the 111th clip. It happens at some point regardless whether the clips are loaded in small groups of 10 clips or by selecting the full range of clips in one go.

When opting to report the bug, Kdenlive concludes that the debug information is not useful.

Question: Assuming Kdenlive works for others, what all needs to be done (instructions?) to remove all libraries and tools that are used by Kdenlive, and what is the recommended way of re-installation sequence (given that the basic installation from Ubuntu Software Center does not result in a robust version of Kdenlive environment)?

Thank you very much in advance and sorry should the question be answered somewhere elsewhere (but basic searching did not lead me to fixing the problem).

hi hlan, try using sunabs PPA, either the 'release' version:

https://launchpad.net/~sunab/+archive/kdenlive-release

or the 'unstable'

https://launchpad.net/~sunab/+archive/kdenlive-svn

There are times when problems with the unstable builds have left people unable to render for a few days for example, but on the whole not too bad.

Alternatively you can use the 'stable' PPA and use an 'unstable' latest build via the build script, the build script versions live in dated folders within your home directory so you can have both a 'stable' PPA build and cutting edge build at the same time, can be useful from time to time.

http://www.mltframework.org/twiki/bin/view/MLT/BuildScripts#Kdenlive

Regarding your Pano HD camcorder, you'll need to be building proxies, via kdenlives project template settings, to play that back in anywhere near realtime. I use kdenlive generated proxies always, takes away some of the load placed on the machine, I'm using 100's of Canon DSLR h264 clips at between 40 & 70Mbps generally.

What does still crash kdenlive though is trying to import a lot of large photos or photo sequences in one go.

MTS remains a complex format.
My superzoom panasonic fotocamera delivers MTS as well. It's the only "video" camera I use as it does an excellent job and makes nice fotos as well (I don't want to carry two devices with me).
I use the following shell script, which uses ffmpeg and exiftool, on my MTS files.
exiftool is used to make sure that my mp4 files get the eaxct same file date as my MTS files.

====
#!/bin/sh

for i in *.MTS;
do
file_date=`exiftool -S -FileModifyDate "$i" | awk '{print $2" "$3}'`
ffmpeg -i "$i" -metadata date="$file_date" -metadata 'Create Date'="$file_date" -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ab 192k -strict experimental "./${i%MTS}mp4";
touch -r "$i" "./${i%MTS}mp4";
done;
====

I run it in the folder where my MTS files are. You can of course replace ffmpeg with avcodec nowadays on Ubuntu.

What it does is copy the h.264 stream (not transcode) to an mp4 container.
I have been working for hours and hours on two large projects using the stable 0.92 from the ppa on Ubuntu 12.0 64bit and I didn't have a single crash: not once.