You shall have to pardon the tone of this post as I have literally spent an ENTIRE DAY trying to complete the simple task of recording a video in Ubuntu on my webcam and loading it into a video editor. First half of the day was wasted on PiTiVi, won't even get into that, then finally found Kdenlive that was hailed as the king of open source video editors, well I download the Ubuntu Software Centre version, configure some settings and try to import and render a saved clip. Rendering doesn't work as I'm missing some codec. Not so bad, I download the codec and it works. Then comes the ordeal of hooking it up to my webcam. After finally finding the Record Monitor I finally notice the Video4Linux option that very clearly notices my webcam devices. Off to the races I thought. Unfortunately it was not to be as every time I enabled audio I got a clip saying INVALID. Same with screen grab, 'Caption crashed, please check your parameters'. After a couple hours of googling these none-too-specific error messages, I finally realized the Ubuntu Software Centre did not point to the latest version of Kdenlive. Why this asynchronicity falls to the user to be managed is quite beyond me, but at any rate I found myself getting the latest Kdenlive 0.9.10. I press the 'Play' button and I can see AND hear myself! So I start to record. AS SOON AS I PRESS THE STOP BUTTON, THE ENTIRE PROGRAM FREEZES. WAITS FOR ME TO KILL IT IN SYSTEM MONITOR. HOGS CPU 100. WTF??????????????????????????????????? EVERY SINGLE TIME. I RECORD FOR 1 SECOND OR 30 SECONDS. DOES NOT MATTER. 'FFmpeg: I believe this captures video from an installed Web Cam using Video4Linux2.' Real helpful guys. I try to run from a terminal. When I press the 'Play' button, it advises that 'capture with some ALSA plugins, especially dsnoop, may hang' - whatever the **** that means. When I record - silence. No error messages. Nothing. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO GOOGLE??!!??!?! 'Kdenlive webcam capture crash' and the like give me about four results that are remotely comprehensible. From which I extract two tangible suggestions: daily builds of Kdenlive and updates of FFmpeg. As I am running a 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04, Option 1 gets me to a version from the 19th of January 2015, and I can barely contain my anticipation as - wait for it! - the Daily Build for that day fails to even register my webcam device. LOL GOOD ONE LINUX NERDS. Whereas option 2 takes me on a wild google chase in which I find out not only about two versions of FFmpeg, rawhide and xfce, neither of which I can figure out how to download, but that the whole library isn't even supported anymore!!! Deprecated!!! And superseded by some other library called avconv, which Kdenlive is no longer compatible with!!! OH THE JOYS OF OPEN SOURCE ****!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My enthusiasm and glee are crescendoing to new heights as whatever douchebag wrote the Kdenlive user manual cautions that 'I must be very careful to remove my distribution packages before installing the compiled ones, or I may be in trouble. Also remove any file from the Kdenlive installation wizard if I used it' BE A LITTLE LESS SPECIFIC, PLEASE????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Counting my lucky charms that I don't brick my OS, I proceed to install a trillion auxiliary packages on said douchebag's recommendation. Libschroedinger actually is not even available in software centre and needs orc-0.4.16+ to be downloaded, config/make/makeinstalled on its own. And what are my results after several more grueling hours of package installation? MY FFMPEG VERSiON IS THE SAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY???????????? WHY??????????? WHY???????????? WHY????????????? WHY???????????? WHY?????????????? WHY?????????????? WTF????????????? WHY????????????????????? WHAT IS FFMPEG.ORG'S LATEST VERSION?????? 2.6!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT ABOUT JOHN SEVERINSSON'S UBUNTU FFMPEG PPA??????? 0.10!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND YET WHEN I TYPE IN FFMPEG -VERSION IN TERMINAL FROM THE FOLDER CALLED FFMPEG-2.6 (THAT I DOWNLOADED AND REINSTALLED A SECOND TIME) WITH AN EXECUTABLE CALLED FFMPEG IN THAT FOLDER?????????? 0.8.16-4 THAT'S RIGHT WHEN I RUN THE MAIN EXECUTABLE IN A DIRECTORY CALLED FFMPEG-2.6 WITH THE FLAG -VERSION I GET 0.8.16-4 NOW HOW IN THE NAME OF **** THAT DOES MAKE THE SLIGHTEST SORT OF SENSE???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Look. I am not a thick man. I understand that a lot of nerds have put a lot of time into producing this freeware for the community. Believe me when I'll say I'm the first to appreciate the sacrifices they have made. Hell I even consider myself a nerd myself from time to time. But when it comes this far. Is just too far. This is not a hard issue. I'm all for learning about Linux and all but there are times when all I want to do is click a button and have the damn thing work, this being incontrovertibly one of those times. It seems that every single little chore in Linux is like fixing your engine. It's as if Linux was Tesla but with a requirement that every driver knew how to fix their own engines, align their own wheels, replace their own defective electric batteries and do anything else that might happen if their electric vehicle broke down in the middle of the road which from the looks of things happens pretty regularly in Linux Land. If so Linux is forever going to be a niche activity. Who is going to go through all this trouble really when they have Movie Maker or any number of other Windows or Mac freewares that are 1-2-3? (Not that I can use them because my Windows partition stutters every 60-80 seconds for some unidentifiable reason, but if it's just people like me you're evangelizing, you guys really have a traction problem on your hands.

Thanks for posting. We'll be sure to save this as an example of how NOT to ask for help.

I'm one of the nerd, douchebag developers that you disparaged and I've got a pretty good idea as to what your problem is.

Sounds like a layer 8 to me.

To be honest, the gentleman's writing style aligned quite a bit with my feelings when I spent the last 4 hours on trying to record a simple voice over (and I'm an open source developer myself). He made an OK rant about having a hard time, and reading it in detail, he does not disparage anyone.

Back to the problem, what he reports seems to be this bug: https://bugs.kdenlive.org/view.php?id=3415

And I believe this commit is supposed to fix it: https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdenlive.gi ... e7415e26c5

So if you're on Ubuntu 14.04 and you have this problem:
- sudo apt-get install subversion git cmake build-essential yasm libqt4-dev kdelibs5-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libxml2-dev libx264-dev libtheora-dev libxvidcore-dev libogg-dev libvorbis-dev libschroedinger-dev libmp3lame-dev libfaac-dev libfaad-dev libgsm1-dev libopencore-amrnb-dev libopencore-amrwb-dev libsamplerate0-dev libsox-dev ladspa-sdk swh-plugins libmad0-dev libpango1.0-dev libvpx-dev
- sudo apt-get build-dep kdenlive
- git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdenlive.git
- cd kdenlive
- git checkout origin/v0.9.x
- mkdir build && cd build
- CMAKE_MODULE_PATH=/usr/share/kde4/apps/cmake/modules cmake .. -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/qmake-qt4
- hopefully cmake will say that there are no errors
- make -j4
- run ./src/kdenlive

I could now record via: "Record Monitor" -> Set dropdown to "FFmpeg" -> Configure button -> Tab "FFmpeg" -> Disable tick "Capture video", enable tick "Capture audio", I left it at the "Default" device. Then record with red button, stop with stop button. Recording appears in the project tree on the left, I can drag it into the timeline.

So this is in some way an LTS problem? In the sense that the LTS distro cannot backport kdenlive fixes while kdenlive development needs to be agile and thus fixes only the faster master branch?