I'm a newcomer to Ubuntu 10.04 and Kdenlive and have been experimenting with both over the past few months. Kdenlive is excellent, but one thing is really bugging me. In the live dvd version, I can encode using h264. In the installed version of Kdenlive on my pc, all the h264 options are unavailable - they have red crosses beside them.

I've read other posts and have seen that there's probably something installed that shouldn't be and something not installed that needs to be. I tried uninstalling / reinstalling the unstripped versions but It hasn't made any difference - I think my inexperience has probably made me make mistakes. I figure the easiest way is to start again from scratch and am quite happy to do this...

Could someone give me a step-by-step set of instructions for getting Kdenlive installed and the h264 rendering options available and working starting from a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04, please?

For that matter, if there's a different linux flavour that works with Kdenlive when installed to hard drive and doesn't give the h264 problem, if someone can tell me, it would be useful and I'd certainly give it a try.

In general, Ubuntu 10.04 does not permit encoding to AAC, which is what most of our H.264 encoding profiles use.
I am using KXStudio, which is based on Ubuntu, and it is enabled by default in there. kxstudio.sourceforge.net

I'am using OpenSuse 11.3.
If you add the Packman repository, you'll be able to install all with a few clicks out of the yast2 --install packet manager.
Packman is building ffmpeg with a very rich codec support (libx264 is included).

@ddennedy
Wow, KXStudio looks amazing! Probably the best liveCD I could ever show to my Vegas/Premiere friends.

I ended up with this combination of software using lucid lynx.

ffmpeg = medibuntu repo (SVN-r0.5.1-4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1)
libavcodec-extra-52 and all other ffmpeg libraries (4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1+medibuntu1)
mlt = sanub2 PPA (0.5.7+git20100907.c8b11129-0ubuntu0~sunab~lucid1)
kdenlive = sanub2 PPA (0.7.7.1+svn20100907.r4857-0ubuntu0~sunab~lucid1 )

I will say the new kdenlive has a slicker look and I can now see the audio wave pictoral within the timeline so I know where to cut if I am looking for a no audio point. I can now encode to x264 and aac again. I love it!!!

Thanks all for these responses.

KXStudio is now running happily on my pc with h264 available. I found with the live version that Kdenlive crashed for me, but having installed it I haven't had a single issue yet.

I have a mpeg2-video (about 4 minutes) NTSC (720x480,29.97fps) mp2 audio 48000 frequency. I am using KdenLive 0.7.7.1 with KDE 4.3.5 OpenSUSE 11.2 with packman repository and ffmpeg and libraries installed. Whenever I attempt to render this clip into H.264 it fails. There is no error. A file is rendered in 0.0 seconds size 2.0 Kb which is basically a blank video file. If I try to play it I get a black background and a stopped displaying before I can blink. Why does this not render properly? I have tried 1000K 2 pass or any other option. I still only get a very tiny Kb file whereas the original file is 186.7 MB.

this happened to me and it was because the location i was trying to write the file to was FULL. stupid mistake but i made it. just make sure your directory you chose to save the rendered file to has room left on it.

What do you mean directory? Do you mean the partition? I'm saving it to the /home/kdenlive directory. The /home partition has 37.2 GB free. I would think that's enough.

Sorry for the post. It was my own stupidity. I thought I could render the clip merely by having it in the clip window not in the timeline. When I dragged the clip to the timeline and rendered it worked. As you can tell this is my first attempt at using Kdenlive.