I built kdenlive from macports yesterday, and the build went flawlessly (after many hours running at at or near a load of 3). I walked through the various enabling steps that were listed on the OSX help page on this site (including correcting the incorrect permissions change instructions for dbus).

When I start kdenlive from /Applications/kdenlive.app/Contents/MacOS/kdenlive, it loads but hangs. When I loaded it in gdb and let it run for a while (long enough to stop it bouncing in the launcher, and me to get some coffee), I stop the program with SIGINT (i.e. ^C) and take a backtrace, and it appears to be waiting for a signal of some variety. Here's the backtrace:

(gdb) bt
#0 0x00007fff832dffca in __semwait_signal ()
#1 0x00007fff832e3de1 in _pthread_cond_wait ()
#2 0x00000001019a1dbb in QMutexPrivate::wait ()
#3 0x000000010199fb1f in QMutex::lock ()
#4 0x0000000101590d44 in KDebug::hasNullOutput ()
#5 0x00000001015f0113 in getBundle ()
#6 0x00000001015f1004 in checkExecutable ()
#7 0x00000001015f13f0 in KStandardDirs::findExe ()
#8 0x00000001015f1b5e in KStandardDirs::KStandardDirsPrivate::createSpecialResource ()
#9 0x00000001015f29ff in KStandardDirs::KStandardDirsPrivate::resourceDirs ()
#10 0x00000001015f3eba in KStandardDirs::resourceDirs ()
#11 0x00000001015f6a10 in KStandardDirs::saveLocation ()
#12 0x00000001015f7457 in KStandardDirs::locateLocal ()
#13 0x00000001015f7689 in KStandardDirs::locateLocal ()
#14 0x00000001015b1435 in KTemporaryFile::KTemporaryFile ()
#15 0x000000010170e359 in KLockFile::lock ()
#16 0x000000010152aa72 in KConfigIniBackend::lock ()
#17 0x000000010150dbad in KConfigPrivate::lockLocal ()
#18 0x0000000101510914 in KConfig::sync ()
#19 0x0000000101592ce2 in KDebugPrivate::writeGroupForNamedArea ()
#20 0x00000001015949e0 in KDebugPrivate::areaData ()
#21 0x0000000101590d83 in KDebug::hasNullOutput ()
#22 0x0000000101705f3d in mac_initialize_dbus ()
#23 0x00000001007c24e5 in KApplicationPrivate::init ()
#24 0x00000001007c390c in KApplication::KApplication ()
#25 0x0000000100014a60 in main ()

I'm not sure what it's waiting for there. dbus looked like it could be a problem, but I have ensured that dbus is running:

~$ ps ax | grep dbus
50 ?? Ss 0:00.01 /opt/local/bin/dbus-daemon --system --nofork

What other services need to be running to make kdenlive happy? Unfortunately I don't really know what the mandatory kde backend processes are, but I have kdeinit4 configured to run at startup. A quick grep showed nothing with kde in the name running, but that might not mean anything.

You are missing a 'dbus --session' in your process listing. After that you need to confirm that kdeinit4 has successfully launched kded4. Please keep in mind that MacPorts is tremendously difficult to support, which is why I rarely respond - I prefer to work on the code instead of fixing broken MacPorts updates.

Confirmed that dbus does indeed resemble a football bat on OSX

Any news on this topic? I also can not start Kdenlive on my Mac. It just happened one day. I updated MacPorts but no success. Any suggestion?