Two Steps Forward for Linux Multimedia

chill writes: "A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was pulled from release with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability. Anyway, the successor to that program, called Cinelerra, is now available in beta form. Give it a shot and see what is what." And Dominic Mazzoni writes: "Talk about a tough act to follow. On the same day that Mozilla 1.0 was released last week, we released version 1.0.0 of Audacity, our GPL cross-platform audio editor that has been under development for nearly three years. It is based on wxWindows and runs natively on Linux (of course!), Windows, Mac OS (both 9 and X), and some other POSIX systems. Version 1.0.0 just adds a couple of minor features and bug fixes, but it is basically stable and quite useful, though it has some limitations. In addition, we also released a snapshot of our unstable development branch as Audacity 1.1.0. This version adds support for 24-bit and 32-bit samples, automatic resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, and internationalization, plus it has many nifty new UI enhancements."

The Cinerella installation process is `unique'

Use rpm -i --force --nodeps to install it.

Euw. A package management system, like any other management system, has network effects. I.e, the power of the system is the square of the nodes. I don't install unpackaged applications because removing one of those nodes has a substantial effect on the usefulness of the system. I.e, I can't install any apps on top of Cinererella if I install it from an unpackaged tarball. Luckily we have the Linux Standard Base and RPM, but the
Cinererella package apparently must be force installed. Euw.

If Heroine Warrior or anyone reading this will host it, I can provide RPMs that will install on most major Linux distributions. If package dependencies are a support issue that HW don't want to deal with, make an apt repository to serve out the RPMs. Any dependent package will be downloaded as necessary from the apt source of the main distro and installed automatically. My email address is mikem, at the domain name above.

Re:The Cinerella installation process is `unique'

rpm -Uvh worked for me.

What widget toolkit does it use? And why does it link with libGL?

Not userfriendly

According to the website, Cinelerra is not intended for end users, because it is not user friendly. They suggest looking at Kino. From Kino's website:

Kino is a simple non-linear video editor. Although it has windows and menus, it is actually a keyboard driven program. It uses many keyboard commands that are similar to the vi text editor.

Hmm. Sounds very user frienly. :^)

I'll give Kino a try though when my new digicam arrives!

I wonder if this will work
:%s/fat/muscle/g

Gotta love the website, though...

From the homepage:

This kind of functionality for no cost is like the sun rising in the west, Americans building skyscrapers, women running for president. It just doesn't happen anymore yet in one act of rebellion you can download it right now.

Yup. They said it went against the laws of God and man... Engineering feats and social change be damned; Chromakey in a tarball obviously heralds the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind. :)

Seriously, though. This is very cool. It's nice to see *nix come up with a free alternative to Adobe "Hey, let's throw Skylarov in the pokey" Premiere.

great news for Linux?

This couldn't come at a better time, IMHO. As a manager at a small media company, I have been very interested in the low price/high reliability of the Linux platform. The one thing holding us back to Windows and Mac was the apps. They just aren't there one Linux, yet.

But I'm downloading both of these now, and this may precipitate a switch in the near future. Admittedly, much of our work is in Flash, in the 468x60 and 336x280 formats, with no sound. But the industry may definitely expand in that direction, and we are already anticipating it.

I'm very excited about the possibilities, as all Linux aficionados should be.

Cinelerra sounds like great news for fan films

While I am no film student Cinelerra sounds like great news for fan films and such and independent film makers when it is described as follows:-

If you want to make movies, you want the compositing and editing that the big boys use, you want the efficiency of an embedded UNIX operating system combined with the power of a general purpose PC, or you just want to defy the establishment, the time has come.

I wonder if this program could be used for rotoscoping (light sabers) and special effects with its compositing functions. It's really great how technology has become cheap enough for budget film makers to be able to produce their own short films ladden with eye candy and special effects we have come to expect from Hollywood.

MainActor

German company MainConcept makes a video editing software for Linux and Windows platforms. Check out MainActor [mainconcept.com].

The cross-platform compatibility is done with Qt, so the basic user-interface quality is very good. Some strangeness in some video editing UI concepts, but otherwise excellent.

I've tried the Linux demo version abt two years ago. It was rather nice even then.

Price $99.

Other LInux Video app.

An other interesting video program to watch: jashakafx [sourceforge.net]. (Hope they ditch the horrid GUI though).

More composting then editing, but shaping up nicely none the less. Brings up the question where the powerhouse apps are... Wasn't Shake released on Linunx as well?

Audacity

I've been using Audacity for the last couple of weeks and found it very simple, very stable, and very very powerfull!

I was looking for something to enable me to rip from audio cassette (dialog/speech only) to wav and then mp3/ogg. Audacity was the only (or best) product I found that allowed me to visually see the tracks so I could splice and dice the two sides of the tape together, remove the pops, and so on.

The only two limitations were that it's mp3 support is limited to predefined bitrates (why not an external command line?), and recording large (ok, huge) wavs caused it to skip sometimes. But then sox saved me.

In summary, as a wav editor it is brilliant!

Let's see if it meet's MainActor.

I have been using MainActor for some time now for Non linear video editing under linux. Yes It's unstable, but it does work. I had high hopes for Broadcast2000 but their abandoning it was and still is very fishy smelling. Cinderella feels very much like Bcast2000, but is still not as stable as mainActor.

Yes, MainActor is not free... but I dont see anywhere that cinderella is going to be free. Linux is horribly lacking in decent - easy to use NLE video editors... Everyone it trying to reproduce what Adobe Premiere is offering or the AVID suite, and that is horribly overkill for 90% of the users. what needs to be designed is one of those simple suites that comes with a firewire card.. allows you to do splicing, title insertion and a few transitions.. (anything but a cut or dissolve is useless... No I dont want to watch your video with 900 different transitions. It makes people puke!)

How about a simple NLE editor? or a stripped down version of Mpegtools that doesn't require 60 different libraries and packages? (this is a great example of what makes statically linked binaries a really good thing.)

So can someone explain this to me?

HW pulled the Broadcast 2000 video editing software over liability issues. Then HW releases another video editor called Cinelerra and its ok to use?

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, if Chewbacca lives on Endor, that does not make sense. You must acquit.

Are your or my terms mixed - Multimedia

I see multimedia when a computer is used to present multiple medias(text, graphics, video, animation or sound) in one presentation integrated (seamlessly).

An audio editor do not exactly fall in this category in my mind.

They use Windows as their development platform

From the news page on the sourceforge site linked to from the Heroinewarrior.com main page:

"Posted By: heroines
Date: 2002-03-27 14:59
Summary:Switch to windows

There's been ever increasing pressure to drop Linux and move everything to Windows. #1 developing desktop applications for what industry increasingly pushes as an embedded operating system is a bad career move. #2 for $60 you can run win32 programs on Windows or Linux natively. The $300 for VMWare didn't fly with users. The $200 for a full Windows license was still too expensive. The $0 for wine wasn't worth the crashes.

By setting the $60 price point, Codeweavers is finally making windows a better development model than Unix more than any technical decision could have"

?! you tell me.

audacity...

For working on audio samples, Audacity is GREAT. I had some old records that are not available on CD that I wished to preserve. The problem is that I've had these since the early 1970's and they are scratched and worn. I sampled them in, fired up Audacity, and used Audacity's noise filter. One of these days I'm going to look over the code for it - it must be some pretty tricky signal processing....

You mark a section of noise, and tell the filter "See that: that's noise. Kill!". The filter will then remove that noise from the signal. The first sample I had the noise went from a "Schoosshh Schooshh" ever rotation to a very faint, high frequency "twinkle". Since the record was speech, I was able to then brick-wall filter that off, and Voila! I had an MP3 that was a pleasure to listen to, rather than a nasty scratchy mess.

Audacity works. Well. Get it. Use it.

(now, if only I could us it to filter out all the crap on the radio... But then I don't listen to the radio....)

Audacity smokes!

I've been using Audacity since 0.97 to record and mix individual tracks from my analog 4-track recorder - it smokes! The only limitations I've hit are those provided by the lackluster driver for my soundcard (f**k creative labs!) - time to get me a Hammerfalle!

I heartily recommend this app to anybody who does any home recording. I've used in in Linux and OS9, I'm sure the win32 version is just fine.

JB

My excitement is contained.

You can find the following on their Sourceforge development page:

Posted By: heroines
Date: 2002-03-27 14:59
Summary:Switch to windows

There's been ever increasing pressure to drop Linux and move everything to Windows. #1 developing desktop applications for what industry increasingly pushes as an embedded operating system is a bad career move. #2 for $60 you can run win32 programs on Windows or Linux natively. The $300 for VMWare didn't fly with users. The $200 for a full Windows license was still too expensive. The $0 for wine wasn't worth the crashes.

By setting the $60 price point, Codeweavers is finally making windows a better development model than Unix more than any technical decision could have.

- end quote

That can be found at:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id= 16 4360

Another poster pointed out that the source tarball contains the libraries of some 10 other OS projects. These include things like lame and libogg. Their previous product bcast2000 used it's own (ugly) widget set as well. We're probably fortunate that this NLE works as well as it does and is polished as it is.

It's hard for me to fathom just where these guys are coming from. Their methodology seems to suggest that they are talented Windows developers who don't even remotely get how UNIX works. They spring this NLE on us almost fully grown and then abruptly pull it because of some shadowy "liability" concern. They then spring its successor on us and are threatening to take it to Windows. There is also an announcement of an upcoming beta on their page where they point out that "it is STILL a native Linux program and won'
t take advantage of "win32 features".

I won't be in the least optimistic about this project's long term Linux prospects until I see a credible UNIX focused fork. These guys are good and wrote some nice software in spite of themselves but as far as their UNIX support goes they're flighty.

This has me excited...

I've used Broadcast 2000 and found it servicable for some things, but not as stable as I'd like.

I'm still searching for the multi-track recording software of my dreams (ardour sure looks nice -- if only I could make sound come out!)

No matter -- this is pretty exciting to me, even if I am little more than an end user and not the sophisticated sort the authors are aiming at.

(talk about a cheesy way to avoid writing documentation!)

Some observations, Cinelerra, Kino, other tools

About cinelerra: As I understand it, the author of broadcast 2000 (which is the same as cinelerra) had an agreement with a company that packaged broadcast 2000 and sold it with support. At some point it appears someone threathened to sue the author, and he withdrew the project.

You can still find the sources to broadcast 2000 on the internet (I even think it is part of the cinelerra sources) and there is also a patch floating around that adds ogg vorbis and openDivx support to it.

Its about a month since I last checked out Cinelerra. At that point it was rather complicated to build - the makefile has errors that will allow the build process to fail but will make it appear to the user that it went OK. When built, it does work, but it is limited in its supports of Video encodings, which is a shame. The DV import module crashed for me, which means that I would have to convert all my DV streams to MPEG2 or MOV format, which is not so great. If you wish, however, the mjpegtools can be used for this.

Cinelerra has a number of transitions etc, which is great. However, a month ago, there were many glitches, and in general the program did not seem stable.

Several people mentioned MainActor. This program works well (for me) and the demo edition will work for as long as you wish, although it will print "MainActor" on any frame rendered by the program. (Read: If you do not manipulate the individual frames, you can actually edit all that you want, but transitions will have the stamp and so on). It does cost money though, and is not OSS. MainActor also have support for text effects, titles and so on. (Which I have not seen on any other Video editor for Linux).

If you are taking up video editing on Linux and you have a DV camera, you should definitively check out Kino. (at sourceforge). Disclaimer: I recently got cvs write access to kino. Kino is build for DV editing, and will keep the DV metainformation, etc, while editing. It has a nice interface - both menus, toolbars and vi style keyboard shotcuts. But, there are currently no support for transitions, titles, or anything like that. Kino cvs, which currently depends on libdv cvs, contains a module called "dvscript" that can be used to create some simple transitions, as well as streams from pngs, etc. I believe it is the plan to eventually integrate this functionality into kino proper.

If you are taking up editing, but mostly with analog video, you shold consider buying an analog to DV converter (An external box that works with Linux costs about $199 + a firewire card). In any case you also want the mjpegtools (sourceforge) to be able to work with captured streams, remove noise, constructs streams that can be used for videoDC's etc. Mjpegtools also support some hardware accelerated capture cards and jpeg compressors.

Kino can export a playlist to a format the mjpegtools can read, which means that it is easy to create e.g. mpeg2 or DivX streams from your DV input.

For your VideoCD creation needs, check out vcdimager.org.

Mads Bondo Dydensborg

THREE steps!

This week, support for RV20/RV30 (RealVideo and RealAudio G2+v8) was added to MPlayer [mplayerhq.com] CVS! It works great and now mencoder can even re-encode .rm movies to DivX .avi! :)

No need for that sucky Realplayer anymore, except for two of its .so-files.. :)

Missing lib files

RPM installed without notifying me that libstdc++.so.3 and libgcc_s.so.1 are required. I found copies of the files (in my /usr/lib/OpenofficeXX/program/) and copied to /usr/lib.

An audio editor for OSX!

Maybe this story ought to be in the Apple section as well, because the appearance of a decent audio editor for OSX is huge. I have been waiting for someone to develop something that's simple, cheap, and works. So far, I have been recording VO audio clips in iMovie and editing them with QuickTime; or recording music in ProToolsFree, which only runs in Classic and is way more complex than I need. Hooray for Audacity! I'm downloading it tonight.

Re:An audio editor for OSX!

Maybe this story ought to be in the Apple section as well, because the appearance of a decent audio editor for OSX is huge.

I'm also very excited about finally getting Audacity to run on OS X, but we need lots of help. It still needs quite a few Mac-specific features (and some bug fixes) and I'm spread thin, trying to lead development of Audacity on all platforms and also work on all of the Mac features. Please join the Audacity development team if you have any programming experience and can help out with the OS X version!

Broadcast 2000 and Lawsuits.....

Ok, so let me get this straight... the initial program that was put out was Broadcast 2000.
However, the program was capable of doing "Professional" quality and features, but there was the chance that it had a few major bugs.
Soo.... the company pulled the product in case some major company sued them for lost information when the program crashed. This just doesn't seem to make much sense.

Question: Can I sue Abobe/Macromedia/Digidesign/Avid/(Insert company here), when Photoshop/Flash/Protools/etc... crashes and I lose a client's information? Because that's what they seem to be afraid of. Instead, couldn't have they just called it a Beta or put a disclaimer on the page (or in the EULA?...)

Don't tell me that each of you haven't lost information ever (well if you had a Beowulf cluster of redundant machines perhaps you haven't), to a program crash?
Why could people sue about it in the first place? Java even has this little neat disclaimer....

The Software may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as online control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines or weapons systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.

Which to me, tends to make me think that a simalar software disclaimer could put saying "If you are producing Starwars III on this, it probably won't handle the 1.7TB of information that the movie has..."

Thoughts anyone?

apt-get

Only an apt-get URI now ;) and we're all extremely pleased.
I had a quick look at the sources in order to build them myselves, but ...

They are _again_ not using the GNU Autotools (which makes packaging a lot harder).

buggers

Lots of Linux Multimedia

Let's see, I've got my video capture card working on v4l, I've got video capture to mjpeg (good balance of 'quality of original encoding' and 'file size taken up by original encoding') working through xawtv's [bytesex.org](no, not a troll, that really is xawtv's URL) 'Streamer' utility, I've got framerate and format conversions of other file types working through mplayer [mplayerhq.hu]'s Mencoder, and I've got The MJPEG tools [sourceforge.net] for generation of VCD and SVCD video from the original sources (the yuvdenoise filter is handy when transferring old VHS's to VCD), and when I want to get more complex with my conversions, I've got transcode [uni-goettingen.de] (the '.ppml' format for subtitle rendering seems to support quite a lot of effects...) and now I've got Cinelerra (which I can never seem to spell properly the first time) for messing with the video itself, once I figure out how to use the program (which now runs on my Slackware box after seeing a previous poster's tip about finding the libgcc* libraries and such in OpenOffice - Thanks!).

Now if only I could get xawtv to recognize that I have libquicktime.so on my machine so that I could save my video to .mov's (so that I can get more than 2GB at a time) I'd be set...

Well, that and support for .ogg [XVid/VP3]/Vorbis video file encoding (MPlayer already supports playback at least, or so I'm told, and it sounds like support for this in ffmpeg [sourceforge.net] may be coming Real Soon Now from what I've seen on the mailing list...)

So, there's quite a lot of work that seems to be going on with Linux multimedia (not even counting proprietary packages and audio-only tools) if you look long enough...

Audacity: Great for Windows, too

For a long time, we didn't have a Really Good audio editor to use in our magazine (and put on our cover CD) when writing about sound editing and conversion. The rest are either complex crippleware (GoldWave, CoolEdit), or too bad to be considered. Audacity fits the entry-level bill nicely with a few Very Obvious buttons right up front, and when you dig in, has lots of good stuff underneath.

Audacity vs GLAME

I'm a die hard gtk user, so I am attracted to GLAME (http://glame.sourceforge.net/index.var). Can anyone compare the two? I'd rather not use a app that is also built for Windows as I fear it's linux integrety is compromised. Also eventually I am interested in SACD production. Does Audacity support 24/96 x 6 channels and 24/192 x 2 channels natively. Is there a linux app that can write to DSD? Thanx, Bearcat

I can't wait for the Audacity RPMs

Especially when I always get these wacked out errors trying to compile audacity:

g++ -c -g -O2 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/lib/wx/include -DGTK_NO_CHECK_CASTS -D__WXGTK__ -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/opt/gtk/1.2.3/lib/glib/include -I/opt/gtk/1.2.3/include -Iallegro Tags.cpp -o obj/Tags.cpp.o
Tags.cpp: In function `wxSizer *MakeTagsDialog (wxWindow *, bool,
bool)':
Tags.cpp:315: `wxFlexGridSizer' undeclared (first use this function)
Tags.cpp:315: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for
each function it appears in.)
Tags.cpp:315: `gridSizer' undeclared (first use this function)
Tags.cpp:315: parse error before `('
Tags.cpp:376: parse error before `('
make: *** [obj/Tags.cpp.o] Error 1

I won't even dare ask how to fix that.

Re:Major Leap.

Could this be part of a home made Tivo like device?

Re:A bad trend

Failure? Who said it is failing? I don't EVER want linux to be like windows!