When I play my clip or project, I hear the audio, but the video preview is just an unchanging white box.

I'm getting a lot of these errors in the terminal from which I launched Kdenlive, FWIW:

Code: Select all

[mpegts @ 0xae35dc00] max_analyze_duration reached
[NULL @ 0xa377dd80] start time is not set in estimate_timings_from_pts

Vitals:

Ubuntu 14.04
Kdenlive 0.9.6
clip is an mpeg

Anything I can do to get the video preview working?

Can you view the clip usinf ffmplay?
Can you view the clip using mlt?

I don't have either of those utilities, but mplayer for example plays both video & audio tracks fine.

Yes, you do have these, as Kdenlive relies on them.

I can't find either of those tools as stand-alone executables.

The ffmpeg library and tools were excluded from Ubuntu 14.04, so they are not available as official packages. It's possible kdenlive provided its own version, in which case it would provide libraries only, without any executables.

Anyway, you may try to look for ffplay in /usr/bin

Do you have this preview problem with only this particular clip, is is the preview broken for all mpeg files?

I have no ffplay neither.

I've since been able to load & play other video clips fine in kdenlive, so maybe there was something peculiar about the first clip I tried to play (though other playback tools seem to be okay with that clip).