I'm going to detail my frustrating experiences trying to get/install/use Kdenlive. Sorry in advance for this long post, but I've followed Kdenlive for well over a year and spent a lot of time trying to make this work and use your app, so far all to no avail, and I think my observations may be worth something.

What distros are the Kdenlive developers using? It would be so helpful to know this and how exactly they're set up. I'm sure Kdenlive must work quite well on some of your machines. I would actually be willing to switch distros to get this thing to work. But I haven't a clue.

That said, I would much rather stick with Ubuntu. I would like to suggest that the Kdenlive devs get a couple of Ubuntu boxes with the latest couple of stable releases installed and make sure that the app installs and runs flawlessly on them. I realize there are lots of other good distros out there, but there is a tremendous groundswell behind Ubuntu. The fact that this cool app basically doesn't run on the most popular Linux distro (in my experience anyway) is pretty mystifying.

I realize that this app depends on other packages like MLT and ffmpeg that for reasons beyond your control, are not up-to-date in Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10. It does kind of puzzle me, however, why you don't just ship a binary package for these with Kdenlive customized up-to-date versions of these packages. Other app distributors have figured out how to do this. Since you've designed KDenlive so that these other packages are absolutely central to Kdenlive's correct operation, it's really not valid to just say, "Sorry, out of our hands."

Firstly, I run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64 bit natively on my main machine. It would be really nice if Kdenlive worked on 8.04 precisely because it's a Long Term Support release and a lot of people are going to continue using it for this reason. I've tried many times over the last few months to run the builder wizard. I can build it fine but it's never stable and won't play back any clips I try to import. I finally gave up on this avenue. The builder wizard is a good idea, but it's just not working, for me at least.

Next, I saw that you were recommending the Ubuntu Jaunty alphas because they have updated ffmpeg packages, so I downloaded Alpha 4 and ran it on a VM with VirtualBox. Now, I realize that performance in a VM is not going to be very good, but other video editors seem to work this way, just very slowly. It seemed pretty promising at first, because for the first time I could actually play back my AVCHD .mts files, and import them into Kdenlive and see their thumbnails and kind of edit. But playback locks up, and I could not get Kdenlive to render anything correctly, not even when doing projects in DV or other lo-res video formats.

Next, a few days ago I downloaded the USB Debian distro you have that has Kdenlive pre-installed. Seems like a great idea, you guys choose the ideal distro for it and set it up correctly. It was easy to format my USB key using the dd command and boot right into it which was cool. But there seem to be a number of key things wrong with this USB distro: could not get on the internet, due to the host settings being wrong. Had to track that down. This is pretty bizarre, I've never seen a Live CD with this problem. Next, there are very few video codecs installed. This wouldn't be a problem, except that the key gets formatted to FAT16 (Huh???) limiting it to 1GB in space and the distro is bloated, so there's almost no room to download other codecs, even though I used a 4GB key. I tried to play a .mts file only to realize I needed a bunch of gstreamer codecs. Video editing and playback just ain't gonna work without a fair bunch of codecs, so I tried to download them and quickly filled up the drive to maximum. Nothing worked after this and no changes could be made. Reformat and start over. The user account that boots up has very few permissions, I couldn't even access my home network drives with all my video files. Ugh. Nautilus starts up by default not in browse mode, which is bizarre. Next, the USB distro doesn't seem to be persistent. Changes made, if they take effect at all, are lost after a reboot. To get more room, I tried to uninstall OpenOffice because it's bloated (why include this giant program on a little USB key where space is at a premium?) so I uninstalled in in Synaptic. But it didn't uninstall, it was still there. Look, the "USB key distro" idea is really intriguing, but in this implementation is one quirky frustration after another. It would be much better if this were a 'persistent' install so that system changes could be made, and please don't include a bunch of bloatware - people could add what they want later. I just want to try out Kdenlive.

It does look to me like the best hope for Ubuntu will be Jaunty. I will probably do a fresh native install on my main machine when this is released. Unfortunately this is still two months away. I do hope the Kdenlive devs see the importance of getting this cool app out and usable onto Ubuntu and put the necessary time into making sure the Jaunty packages are a real priority. A lot of work is going into Kdenlive and it looks like an awesome and much needed app. I just don't see how many people at all are able to use it in the present situation.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks for all the work. A good video editor is so important for Linux progress and Kdenlive really has the potential to be the cream of the crop

- Eric

I have to admit... I did not read all of that...

Personally (I am not a dev!) I made the switch from Ubuntu to OpenSuse largely because Kdenlive packaging there was very much up to date (and easy with their 1-click install). Now I understand some more of linux/kdenlive and will play with Debian a bit soon. There's a lot of talk about Ubuntu packages in the forum recently, perhaps you can explain some issues you run in these threads? Or maybe (again) try your luck with the Kdenlive Builder Wizard which installs latest ffmpeg/mlt/etc for you and makes upgrading to the latest developments a breeze.

For specific problems with the live usb... I would say try to isolate the problem and post a bug report so admins can look at it and fix it. Anyway try to not get frustrated and post specific problems! It's worth it, in my opinion at least.

Hello Eric,

Thanks for sharing these experiences: funny, although I only started exploring Kdenlive since december, I had the same questions and experiences. Only I first tried Kdenlive under Fedora (not Ubuntu), because so far, that was my 'working' distro at home. At work I also use or used SuSE and Red Hat, but since I was more familiar with Fedora (and Red Hat) currently, I started with that.

Last 2 months (december, january) I installed and tested: Mandrake 2009-1, Debian Live for Kdenlive, Debian KDE 4 (from download.kde.org), Fedora 10, openSUSE 11.1 (both KDE 4.1.3 and 4.2) and Ubuntu (Kubuntu) 8.10 (intrepid ibis). Never burned so much CD's and DVD's in a short time ;-)

My objective was to get a stable OS and Kdenlive, yet be able to follow the developments. These are of course contradictory requirements, but I thought if I'd use the builder wizard (bw) on a stable enough OS that would do the trick. The bw has a nice feature 'Append date' and thus enables you to always fall back to an earlier working checked out version that worked well (e.g. I cannot get the svn checked out kdenlive to compile since a week). That was the idea... :-)

My experiences mostly parallelled yours. There were a couple of moments where I thought, "why am I not buying a decent enough Mac (1200 euro) and just use Final Cut Studio 2 (another 1200 euro) and be done for 2.5k?"  But apart from the fact that I'm broke at the moment (married last year ;-) ), the Linux geek in me wouldn't accept failure. And, simply, kdenlive just feels like a nice and sympathetic program. To make a long story short: I ended up choosing openSUSE 11.1 (with KDE 4.2) using either a self-compiled Kdenlive from the bw or simply using the latest from SUSE's Packman repository. It is safe to use both, because the one built with the bw is contained to ~/src (including the ffmpeg and mlt stuff) and do not conflict with the ones from SUSE itself.

Here are my reasons for openSUSE 11.1:

• It's a stable enough OS (no Rawhides and Jaunties, thank you, for my editing work)


• The Packman repository is very rich (richer that RPMfusion imho) and provides all the necessary required libs etc. for kdenlive; it even has recent versions (0.7.2.1) of kdenlive itself (it's unique among the other distro's in this respect, correct me if I'm wrong;kde4-kdenlive-0.7.2.1-0.pm.2 at the time of writing, a great thank-you to Toni Graffy!)


• Installation of kdenlive from source with the bw is well documented (see ref's on this site)


• No problems with firewire (ieee 1394) device drivers; grabbing with 'dvgrab' just worked right away (I mostly edit my DV camcorder videos), a regular user is member of the 'video' Unix group automatically, no fuzzing around etc.


• 'Problematic' libraries (mp3, mpeg etc.) can be easily installed, lots of fonts and font hinting in freetype is enabled

I had a lot of problems with Fedora 10. There is an interesting posting of another user regarding F10: but like he said, there's no rpm for 'plei0r' and when I tried to build it from source I got into all sorts of library dependency problems (the devel libs on F10 are simply not recent enough) and so no success with Fedora. Not much luck with Debian 'sid' either, because in order to get KDE 4 I had to add the experimental deb repo's, too, and that got me into a repo/lib dependency hell as well. Kubuntu 8.10 (ibis), which I quite liked, did not work out either, with similar results as you reported for 8.04. From the tutorial video's I noticed jmpoure uses Debian (but I assume it's an 'evolved' one, home brew) and ddennedy uses (K)Ubuntu 8.10 (with bw) (!) and ArchLinux in answer to a similar posting by me. So it should be possible with Ubuntu, but may well be a matter of precise setup; more documentation could indeed probably help everybody there.

So to summarize, openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4 (4.2) and the Pacman repository, with both kdenlive from that repo and built with the Builder Wizard so far works best for me, but depending on use type and experience your mileage may vary. Anyways, I'm happily editing my marriage video's ;-)

Good luck,

Eric -- yes, another Eric ;-)

The most updated packages are Debian SID withDebian Marillat repositories IMHO. They are updated very frequently. BT, don't try to find the best distro using a live or an USB key. If you are new to GNU/Linux, you may try another distro first. Ubuntu (a Debian derivate) or SuSE are good choices. 

Anyway, I will open a dedicated place on the forum to report the quality of live DVDs and CDs.

What I keep in mind about USB/DVD live:

• All gstreamer codecs should be included (I though they were).


• USB size should be 2Gb.


• File system should be FAT32 or NTFS, not FAT16.


• Changes should be stored on USB disc to become permanent.

I am in contact with Debian live developers on IRC and will report back.

I'm another openSUSE-11.1 user.  [I'm NOT a developer].  In my case I am running KDE-3.5.10 (also with some KDE-4.1.3 libraries) and this allows me to run kde4-kdenvlive as packaged by the Packman packagers (they package many 3rd party multimedia packages for openSUSE:   http://packman.links2linux.org/package/kde4-kdenlive ).  It works well, and its reasonably stable.  While KDE4 has tremendous promise, and its getting more and more stable, with more and more features by the day, IMHO openSUSE-11.1 KDE-3.5.10 is still the best KDE implementation around.