Kdenlive is not recording video capture from my webcam

First, let me say that, while I am fairly technical, I am not a Linux guru. I am really nothing more than an end user that has gotten fed-up with Microsoft and has installed and administered my Linux laptop through the GUI. So while I am quite capable of following directions to troubleshoot my problems, it should not be assumed that I know how to do things that you might think are easy or obvious.


I have recently begun looking for a video editing software that will allow me to put together videos that will eventually end up on youtube. I do not anticipate anything being more than ½ hour long. While looking at my options, while I was hoping to find something that had both a Linux and a Windows version so that I could use the same software as my daughter on her Windows laptop, that just does not seem to be the case.

I have looked at OpenSHOT, Avidemux, Kino, Lives and Kdenlive. I have settled on Kdenlive because it has the features that I want, it is easy enough for me to actually use it and, for the most part, it just works.

My problem is with capturing video from my webcam, everything else seems to work fine.

On the Record Monitor, I select FFmpeg from teh drop-down menu and go into the Configure screen for “Capture”. I then go to the “FFmpeg” tab. Here I make sure that the video device is set to the webcam I want to use(in my case I have two webcams: /dev/video0 and /dev/video1). I then click the “Apply” button and then the “OK” button.

Back on the Record Monitor I click the play button and I get the web cam image just fine. I can stop and restart the play mode just fine. However when I try to record something, the video stops (if I click record while video is already playing, the video freezes, if I press record while video capture is stopped, I get no picture. When I click on stop, the whole application locks up. When I try to close down the Kdenlive, I get a message saying that Kdenlive is not responding and I have to “Force Quit”.

I am running Mint 17.1 with the Mate GUI.
The version on Kdenlive is 0.9.8 using the KDE Development Platform 4.14.2

I have tested my webcam in both Cheese and Skype so I know that the webcam itself is working fine.

My guess that that there is a problem with Kdenlive or with Video4Linux2, but I have no idea where to look to identify what the problem is or how to fix it. I have looked at the Kdenlive documentation and all it says about the FFMPEG capture feature is “I believe this captures video from an installed Web Cam using Video4Linux2”. Unfortunately, not much help there.

I would appreciate any help you could give.

Thanks.

I have a vagure recollection of simlar issue when I was playing with audio only capture which also uses the ffmpeg capture.
You could try a 0.9.10 version that has bug fixes and this might be one of them.
I recomend the "daily build" method see
https://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manua ... ily_builds
because you can keep your existing install and test out the daily build version.

tcotariu wrote:“I believe this captures video from an installed Web Cam using Video4Linux2”.

Yep the manual does say that. And the "I" in that sentance is me. 'cause I don't own a web cam I was hoping someone who does own one might make this statement a bit more definative.

tcotariu - when you get this issue fixed - you can fix the manual