I generated a 1920x1080p @ 25fps HD clip according to these instructions:

http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/rendering-1920-becomes-1440-yet-still-plays-widescreen-format

I can play it OK in Movie Player on Ubuntu 10.04, but it says the duration is only 5'19" instead of what it actually is. FFMpeg reports the duration as 00:24:33:00, which is correct. When it gets to the end of the slider at 5-1/2 minutes, it continues to play.

But when I import it back into kdenlive, it says the duration is only 19 seconds! What does ffmpeg do differently than kdenlive? I thought that it used ffmpeg internally for a lot of things.

M2T's are HDV? mpeg2 1440x1080? rather than 1920x1080, non square pixels and all that, as per your 1440 link?

Movie Player aka Totem? Is GStreamer based, although ffmpeg support is accessible through that media framework, is it ffmpeg that's actually playing your clip, maybe not. I don't know, never use Movie Player "Totem" due to always complaining about having to search for some codec or other. MPlayer seems far less hassle.

ffmpeg support for seeking in M2T's I've found to be dodgy, I find HDV a pain to edit with kdenlive. It really isn't a good choice, h264 would be far better for PC media playback / web etc. Was there a specific reason to choose HDV?

"M2T's are HDV? mpeg2 1440x1080? rather than 1920x1080, non square pixels and all that, as per your 1440 link?"

No, I meant this post from Dan Dennedy further down in that thread:

http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/rendering-1920-becomes-1440-yet-still-plays-widescreen-format#comment-13493

I followed those instructions.

Ok, post #7 on that thread. So what does ffplay tell you about your encoded file? Just to remove what MLT or kdenlive may or may not be doing differently if anything at all.

It all works now. You can view the finished project here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfDa5_p7668