Back-story:

I've been struck with the rendering problem in Kdenlive that many people have been encountering lately. I've been looking through the forum and I've tried many of the solutions that were posted such as installing the subversion that was supposed to fix this (This probably didn't work because, from what I read, I think that the subversion included in the ppa:sunab/kdenlive-svn was supposed to fix Kdenlive in Ubuntu 10.10 and I'm using 10.04) I've also stumbled through the different libraries that supposedly had something to do with Kdenlive and tried to install the proper version, but I don't think I did a very good job. The solution that I see consistently working on the forums is downgrading Kdenlive and MLT. But, I probably uses Ubuntu Software Cent

re a bit too much for my own good and don't completely understand how packages in Ubuntu work, so I've had trouble downgrading.

Question:
Could you please give some step-by-step instructions on how to downgrade Kdenlive and MLT to a version that will probably allow me to render properly?

Consider upgrading Ubuntu to 11.10 first. Then if that doesn't fix the problem, uninstall kdenlive, MLT and ffmpeg including all the libav stuff like libavcodec etc, this could hurt due to many other applications that use the ffmpeg libraries, once uninstalled go into all the locations that hold those libraries and apps such as /usr/bin /usr/lib and check that all traces of those libraries and apps are gone then reinstall kdenlive.

But hopefully upgrading to 11.10 would fix the problem without resorting to the rest.

Since 2 years, I compile and install the most important components myself into a home directory of a separate user. x264, ffmpeg, mlt and kdenlive. There is also a build script present, but with it I've no experience.
For my opinion this is the only way to get full control of all versions and avoid conflicts regarding to already installed stuff from any repos.
To work with kdenlive means, that you have so many other open source projects involved. A Packet maintainer couldn't proof all functionalities.
I use Open Suse 12.1 and since yesterday I'm finite stable again.
Christian

Yes, I do the same now, I have sunabs release PPA via synaptic but use the build script to get the latest functionality and to avoid the many conflicts that can arise from manually compiling system wide or relying on one svn PPA system wide particulary ffmpeg related. Brought to light recently with the major rendering problems and reliance of one single development build. Which really should be for testing only.

@0100101 The advantage of the build script is that it creates isolated builds to dated folders within our home folder. So if one build becomes a problem we can step back to a previous working build albeit at a minor risk of introducing incompatibility of project handling using builds of ongoing development.