I captured about 15 minutes of gameplay with VirtualDub with the HuffYUV video codec, and PCM for the audio codec. The resulting file was about 36GB.

When I loaded the clip into Kdenlive, I discovered that clicking anywhere in the timeline would cause my hard drive light to go on for a couple of minutes before the cursor would move to that point in the video. Clicking anywhere else, or hitting the arrow keys to rewind or advance a frame would cause the same behavior. Trying to play the project would also result in a similar delay. Pause the playback and then hit play again? Delay.

It seems as though any attempt to seek within the file results in Kdenlive finding the spot by reading the file again from the beginning. Is there something about the AVI container format which prevents random seeking within the file?

I did find a workaround: If I render the video to H.264 lossless, I can load the resulting MKV file and get subsecond response times when working in the timeline.

Has anyone else encountered this behavior? Is this a bug, or just an unavoidable consequence of dealing with the AVI format?


Hans Dannik