Just installed both the new packages, MLT first, then Kdenlive. Exactly the same result. Same errors as before. Will try to provide a screenshot. The first error occurs immediately on trying to open Kdenlive, the second when clisking OK. Guess installation of Slack just isn't going to play nice. As previously mentioned, I did get Cinelerra installed and it seems to be pretty stable.

Bob

Pretty strange; a few things worth trying:
- Try to re-install MLT and Kdenlive by uninstalling and reinstalling;
- Before that, go to http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ and get the following packages from him (these are the packages I used as well during the build)
-- yasm
-- faac
-- faad2
-- ffmpeg

Additionally, you could try to give the output of the commandline utility:

melt yourvideo.mpg

If melt (MLT's commandline videoplayer) runs the video things are wrong in a different way, but I guess there's something wrong with MLT due to the dependencies as stated above.
For ffmpeg I needed yasm; faac and faad2 actually are compiled when building ffmpeg from Alien Bob's package, but it won't hurt to have those along. I expect things to run fine after this.

If I may guess freely: I guess "yasm" is the killer here; I bet the part for ffmpeg in MLT cannot parse something and makes MLT crash eventually. So, you can try to take the shortcut and install yasm and see if that fixes it.

Hi Drumar,

MLT certainly seems to be the problem here. I tried to play an avi file with:

bob@bob-laptop:~$ melt WhoLetTheDOgsOut.avi

and got:

sage: melt [options] [producer [name=value]* ]+
Options:
-attach filter[:arg] [name=value]* Attach a filter to the output
-attach-cut filter[:arg] [name=value]* Attach a filter to a cut
-attach-track filter[:arg] [name=value]* Attach a filter to a track
-attach-clip filter[:arg] [name=value]* Attach a filter to a producer
-audio-track | -hide-video Add an audio-only track
-blank frames Add blank silence to a track
-consumer id[:arg] [name=value]* Set the consumer (sink)
-debug Set the logging level to debug
-filter filter[:arg] [name=value]* Add a filter to the current track
-group [name=value]* Apply properties repeatedly
-help Show this message
-join clips Join multiple clips into one cut
-mix length Add a mix between the last two cuts
-mixer transition Add a transition to the mix
-null-track | -hide-track Add a hidden track
-profile name Set the processing settings
-progress Display progress along with position
-remove Remove the most recent cut
-repeat times Repeat the last cut
-query List all of the registered services
-query "consumers" | "consumer"=id List consumers or show info about one
-query "filters" | "filter"=id List filters or show info about one
-query "producers" | "producer"=id List producers or show info about one
-query "transitions" | "transition"=id List transitions, show info about one
-serialise [filename] Write the commands to a text file
-silent Do not display position/transport
-split relative-frame Split the last cut into two cuts
-swap Rearrange the last two cuts
-track Add a track
-transition id[:arg] [name=value]* Add a transition
-verbose Set the logging level to verbose
-version Show the version and copyright
-video-track | -hide-audio Add a video-only track
For more help:

I already have all of those files your listed, including yasm (also from Alien Bob's repos), so that probably isn't the issue. I have uninstalled and reinstalled both apps at least five times each. Certainly has me stumped. The only other thing I could try is to compile MLT from source so that it will compile against the libraries I have installed. That is the only thing I can think of.

On the plus side, while I haven't tried to render yet, Cinelerra is performing adequately with just a couple little niggles. It is so much more complicated than Kdenlive, that I would rather use Kdenlive for my purposes, but it isn't going to work, I'll just have to use what I have. I can use Kdenlive in Ubuntu if I need to, it is just very unstable and crashes/freezes alot.

Bob

Sad to hear it isn't going to work; At the moment it beats me towards how this can be... seems we're both on the same libraries / other software... only thing I can think of is tracing what is being required. The packages mentioned, did you have them installed from Alien Bob or from slackbuilds.org or linuxpackages.net? If either of the latter, it might be that Alien Bob uses /usr/lib for libraries whereas slackbuilds and linuxpackages use /usr/local/lib. That would mean I could / should reinstall those packages with a /usr/local prefix instead of the /usr prefix.

All of the mlt files are in /usr/share and not /usr/local. Interesting though that the result of:

ldd `which mlt`

is this:

which: no mlt in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/lib/java/bin:/usr/lib/kde4/libexec:/usr/lib/qt/bin:/usr/share/texmf/bin:.)
ldd: missing file arguments

The result of:

whereis mlt

is:

mlt: /usr/lib/mlt /usr/include/mlt /usr/share/mlt

Strange results. Never have encountered this before.

Bob

Well, I physically checked each library in /usr /usr/local just to be sure. The, just in case, I also did the symlink. Same results, no change. Glad that got it going for you, though. Something about my installtion of Slack current is just not going to work with Kdenlive.

Bob

EDIT: I was mistaken. I also had them in /usr/share AND /usr/local/mlt/lib, probably just as you have done, but the symlink did not work for me. I get the same results.

Thank you, that's kind of you to provide that info. But to tell you the truth, I have been wrestling with this for almost a week now, and I am to the point that I don't really want to bother trying to recompile mlt. I used Drumars Slack packages and I have not compiled either kdenlive or mlt, just installed the packages. But I do have Cinelerra working pretty well (even though it is WAY more complicated!) and I have learned enough about it to do as much as I can in Kdenlive (and a massive amount more..) I have not tried rendering yet, but the basic composition is fairly easy.

I DO have kdenlive working on Ubuntu, but it crashes and freezes a lot (though it does autosave the work). Just gets too frustrating. I also have the 0.7.3 version running on another desktop, and it is considerably more stable, but weak in features (almost NO transitions or effects to speak of.)

Any, once I have rested my brain a little, I might give this another shot.

Bob

iirc linuxpackages and probably others as well "demand" things to be built in /usr/local (which is logical, given the FHS) but probably since Alien Bob is part of the Slackware team things are built in /usr (?) just speculating; I tend to find his packages to be of a very good quality, which is why I always use those. My bet is that my next release will come along with other required packages, as soon as they have been identified properly.

Given the output of ldd the problem does not seem to be a shared lib issue, but rather something along the lines of a called binary, which is harder to identify... just hoping "melt -verbose" can shed some light... will dive deeper, slackers will get a proper package!

Thanks aomega for the input, really much appreciated. As it is late here now, I'm not sharp enough to see how to alter things to make things work out of the box (which is what I aim for) I'll re-read and have a thought about other flags to give the compile procedure to get things work out of the box.

The problem -afaics- is people using different packages for dependencies, resulting in upredictable results, unless I "include" those packages / use static linking, but that's pretty much against the whole idea of being able to use shared libs... As a workaround I can write an install script that would make the symlinks, but even that I consider a bit hacking-like.

Bob: as for stability: I doubt I can do much against that; kdenlive is still not at a 1.0 release, so instability is -much as it hurts me to say- a thing to take in stride at this point in time. However, I see this project as something very promising, so I will go on and keep on building and trying. But I kinda need input to see how to get a proper package that everybody will enjoy.

qimage-libdir is supposed to reside in /usr/lib
qimage-includedir in /usr/include/qt4
I did compile it with --avformat-swscale, the --avformat-shared=/usr

mlt is not the binary, so it should never be in your path ;-) melt is, so a which melt should give you more info; It should reside in /usr/bin; the libraries in /usr/lib and /usr/lib/mlt (due to a /usr prefix in the compile)

Some interesting output may come from stracing kdenlive like this:
on a shell prompt: strace -f -F -efile kdenlive >kdenlive.strace 2>&1

Then check the file for some "strange" ENOENT, you will probably get many, but this will give insight on what files kdenlive wants to open and -most important- fails to open and where they are expected. The file may become rather large, could you send a message to me with this file? In the mean time, I will build a new fresh slack machine and try this as well; then I will compare the output and see where the differences occur, which hopefully will shed light where things are going wrong.

Figured out the problem with strace as well, now that I'm back on my pc. This led me to check out the melt binary, and it appears the --prefix path is hardcoded into melt, making it search in my build directories, which -obviously- do not exist on your systems, making me believe it actually worked;

I'm currently rebuilding MLT to fix this issue; should've thought of it myself, soon to come mlt-0.4.4-3-i686_MDG.tgz and hope this fixes it; also building an even cleaner slackware-current system to test out the packages before release, not a bad idea ;-)

Rebuilt MLT and tested it succesfully, up to starting kdenlive; Crashes afterwards have not been tested yet, but I think those are more likely to be related to the project. Please feel free to test this new package out and comment on it.

Fixed

Drumar,

Hallalujah!! Your new MLT package fixed it. I can now get into Kdenlive. I have tested a couple of clips and it seems to be working OK. Odd, though, in the Jaunty version of 0.7.5 I have about two dozen transitions available. In this one for Slack, there are only four. Can I get the others somewhere separately, or is this version for Slack available with only these.

Many thanks for your hard work on this. It was driving me crazy...I would be interested to know what you changed to get it solved. I would be a good learning experience.

Bob

Great to hear from both of you the last remaining problem to get things running was in MLT, which I fixed by setting --prefix to /usr; I had that set to my package installdir. Strace helped me analyze it, and this ultimately fixed it. I had expected the profile path set to something in a config file, not the binary itself.

Also, your report towards the transitions; I will look into this, but I think the point here is with ffmpeg. It can be built with several codecs etc... I will see which transitions I have available when I get back from work.