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Graphics Software Linux

Good News For Creating Quicktime On Linux 149

Posted by timothy from the keen-oh-kino dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It's now possible to capture DV Quicktime files in Linux, splitting automatically at any predetermined size, and seamless importing the files to Windows (may be possible with Macs too but I don't have one to test with). The new version of Kino is out and it supports Quicktime." This requires that you specifically configure Kino to handle QuickTime, at least in this version. Read on below for a few notes about the submitter's experience with Kino, Cinelerra, Cinestream and other A/V editing tools.

"I've been finding Kino handy for capturing from VHS and Hi-8 because the auto-split avoids sync issues with large files. Cinestream (Windows NLE) can't seem to keep long captures in sync when I use my Sony DVMC-DA1 box but capturing in Kino has been a simple un-attended workaround. Now that it captures in Quicktime, it's even better because I can feed the Quicktime files directly to Cinestream with no pre-processing, and the quality is very good.

If you also install Cinelerra, you can also view some types of Quicktime in Linux. Cinelerra is an awesome multi-track NLE with several supplied effects/transitions/filters, but it also includes "X movie," which plays DV files captured with Cinestream as well as some other types (but nothing with Sorenson).

Both Cinelerra and Kino can open and edit Quicktime files from Cinestream.

Oh, what about audio? I've been trying a program called " Ardour" which is a real-time 24-track hard-disk recorder on Linux. Of course it's useful for "simpler" things too like a precision audio editor.

Check out the screenshots.

So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing (with nice interfaces too). And since it and the apps are free, that goes a long way. Microsoft said in a recent filing that it may be forced to lower prices due to competition from free software. Maybe one day the only people who pay for an editing package will be those who need support or buy it preconfigured with hardware."
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Good News For Creating Quicktime On Linux More

Good News For Creating Quicktime On Linux

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  • Quicktime on Linux (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 06, 2003 @05:26PM (#5244802)
    Good, now we can create it, but when will I be able to view quicktime on Linux?

  • its a bit late (Score:4, Funny)

    by workindev ( 607574 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @05:30PM (#5244830) Homepage
    So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing

    To bad they are about 5 years late.

    • Re:its a bit late (Score:3, Insightful)

      by NamShubCMX ( 595740 )
      So what? Once it will be there it will. Being late or not won't matter anymore...

    • This ain't a race. It's a bout getting stuff done. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm sorry to offend you, but: Duh.

      Right, I see what you mean, btw: Linux "lost" the "game" and the others "won". Yippee. Kudos to the proprietary (which should be listed under to "needlessly expensive" in the thesaurus) solutions. They get a point.

      I'm looking forward, however, to the day when you're still paying through the nose (or any other available orifice MS might like you to use) for things I'm getting (for) free.

      (Notice the carefully worded meaning: the software IS free when I get it FOR free. Meaning "free" as in "speech" - and as in "beer".)

      (And i'll figure it out for you for free, too: I can work for my clients for less than you can, then. Or simply have a much larger profit margin. That way, you ACTUALLY lose and I ACTUALLY win. See you in the real world, chum.)

    • Re:its a bit late (Score:2, Insightful)

      by amigaluvr ( 644269 )
      I'm not so sure about this.

      I mean quicktime may be good and all but it is proprietary. It makes you locked into using a format that is out of your control.

      What happens when the patent holders withdraw or change formats? How about when new better ones come in and the old is abandoned?

      Suddenly your media files are not working anymore. You'll find there's little you can do about this but rant and hoo-haa. A better solution would be proper support of the open formats. Not only are they open free and gueranteed to work, but they are often better than the commercial alternatives.

    • Re:its a bit late (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Late for what? Has "high-quality editing" gone out of style or something? I will go way out on a limb here and say that there will still be a need for good a/v editing tools the future, not to mention free ones.

      If the post was supposed to be funny, well, sorry, I missed it...
    • A video codec is neither early, nor late Mr. Workindev, it arrives exactly when it was supposed to.

      </bad_lotr_misquote>

  • what it can do (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 06, 2003 @05:32PM (#5244854)
    Just in case it's already /. !

    Summary
    The latest version of Kino fixes a number of bugs while improving the user interface and adding support for Quicktime DV files and dv1394.

    Audio Encoding
    This release fixes a number of audio encoding issues, which also requires libdv version 0.99. Kino 0.6.3 will still use libdv 0.98, but libdv 0.99 is required to completely fix it. Movie projects with mixed audio formats work better now not only in FX. In addition, with mixed audio format projects, new resampling options in Export provides a more consistent stream to IEEE 1394 devices or DV output files.

    Audio Crossfade Effect
    Also, while speaking of audio, the FX/Audio/Transition/Switch has been changed to a Cross Fade with user-definable spline-based controls for the fade out of clip A and the fade in of clip B.

    dv1394
    This release adds support for dv1394. dv1394 is optional and is not the default for both capture and export. As a result, Preferences has changed quite a bit to accomodate this change. If you have previously had trouble exporting DV back to your camera because your camera did not accept the signal, then you should try dv1394. It reportedly works for nearly everyone where video1394 would not work. dv1394 is a new module in kernel 2.4.19 and later, or you can get it from Linux 1394 Subversion. A special new feature with dv1394 is a "Preview on external monitor" preferences display option. With this enabled, as you work in Edit or Trim, all video preview is also output using dv1394! Carefully, read the new dv1394 help page at http://www.linux1394.org/dv1394.html before attempting to use it.

    Quicktime
    The release also adds support for Quicktime DV that is compatible with Heroine Virtual's Broadcast 2000 or Cinelerra. This is native support meaning you can capture to it, edit it, and export it using Export/DV File. You must explicitly configure Kino for Quicktime using the --with-quicktime configure option.

    Capture
    A major bug affecting Capture and AV/C was located and fixed. Enabling AV/C would start a thread to poll for transport status and timecode. There was a bug in the timecode routine that can deadlock the thread. For some devices AV/C has not worked well. This was addressed partly with libavc1394 0.4.1 but Kino has made some improvements as well (including the above bugfix :-). One additional improvement, which seems to help, is the AV/C Poll Interval in preferences. The polling thread appears to be too intensive for some devices. The default is now 200ms, which is a fairly safe value, but you can try increasing it up to 999. On the other hand, my camera handles the lowest value of 10ms just fine. Also, now Kino waits for 3 failures to retrieve this information in a row before giving up and resetting the state of Kino's transport buttons.

    Eye Candy
    There is some nice new user interface features too. First, there is the More Info panel that expands to show detailed information about the file, video format, and audio format for the current frame. Second, in the scene strip on the left of the window, the current scene highlights. The previous two additions only work when timecode update is enabled, so if you are constrained on CPU power, you can leave all these things disabled for better performance although the overhead is very slight on and, for example, an AMD 800MHz shows no penalty. Third, there is a newly designed scrub bar and trim control. Finally, a convenient command reference window is available under the Help menu or by pressing Ctrl+F1.

    MPEG Export
    A cleanup option is added to Export/MPEG that is enabled by default. Disable the option to prevent the exporter from deleting temporary files in case mplex fails. Also, there is a bugfix to properly split into separate mpeg files for each scene--this option does not use mplex splitting, so this works very good for creating multiple chapter DVDs with dvdauthor.

    Jog/Shuttle Controller
    If you are a USB Jog/Shuttle user, then we now use the HID driver and not custom modules. We do not know if this works OK with the Sony controller. If you use the Sony controller, let us know. It it still easy to compile Kino for use with the custom modules. However, the HID driver works good with the Contour ShuttlePRO, loads nicely with hotplug, making this a more simple ready-to-use option for users.Using a shuttle controller in conjunction with the new Preview on External Monitor feature is very nice! Note that keymappings have changed some with the move to the HID driver; however, key mappings are now configurable in Preferences. One can press the key (combinations too!) on the controller with the dialog open to select it.

    FFMPEG Libavcodec
    If you are trying to use Kino on a PowerPC, you can try to enable FFMPEG libavcodec using the --with-avcodec options. The libavcodec DV decoder adds accelleration for PowerPC whereas libdv does not. See configure --help or the README for more information. We will not be embedding any libavcodec source code at this time to avoid any legal ramifications. Therefore, this option may be out of sync with the latest libavcodec API from time-to-time.

  • mencoder could offer some quicktime support (Score:5, Informative)

    by narfbot ( 515956 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @05:33PM (#5244865)
    From v0.90pre2 changes: "experimental Sorenson 1/3 encoding (using quicktime DLLs) (only to AVI, and these files can only be played with MPlayer! It's needless to mail us about when will be MOV encoding too, as neither we know:) "

    Mencoder is part of MPlayer." [mplayerhq.hu]

    It is not complete, but chances are you can encode/capture avi-ish Sorenson with Mencoder. This will probably work with most of the extra filters and encoding options to make changes the video. Seeing .mov support in other programs, I doubt finishing .mov support in Mencoder will take long.

    Although I bet linux still not that great for MOV editing/encoding, it's coming along quite nicely right now as you can see.

  • DMCA (Score:2, Funny)

    by petronivs ( 633683 )
    Does this new breakthrough have DMCA implications?
    (Yeah, I know, but I thought it needed to be said.)

  • Why is this `good news` ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GMC-jimmy ( 243376 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @05:46PM (#5244980) Homepage
    With the existance of DivX, Xiph.org and many others.

    Not saying there aren't any, but I have yet to see a QuickTime video that matches the quality of some of the other formats. A visit to TheForce.net has given me this opinion.

    • Re:Why is this `good news` ? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I dont' know about that...every DivX I've seen has been so horrible as to be basically unwatchable. It's good for previewing something, but there's no way I'd watch something more than once with it. The only exception to that is a movie I downloaded which is never going to be released, so DivX is my only options.

      Using theforce.net as your basis for disliking Quicktime is a bad idea. Go view the trailers at www.apple.com/quicktime for a better idea of what QT can do. It's all about the codecs at this point, not the container.
      • It depends on who makes them. A 90-100 minutes movie can be transcoded to DivX, can still fit into 700Mb and have an image quality reasonably close to the original. But you have to know the tricks. ;-)
    • Because Quicktime is the wrapper format for MPEG4. So quicktime support paves the way for use by the broadcast industry, which is in the process of choosing between MPEG4 and WindowsMedia9 as the default high-end format.
    • With the existance of DivX

      Personally, I wouldn't include DivX on a list of viable formats to encode with on Linux. 5.0.3 was recently released on windows, and Linux is still on an alpha release of 5.0.1, with no 'pro' version available. I'd be more annoyed though if I wasn't getting better results anyway with xvid or the mpeg4 encoding from libavcodec than DivX 5.0.2 under wine.
    • Helloo... We're talking about DV in a quicktime wrapper. Quicktime is a wrapper format, not a codec. DV is a codec, and theforce.net is not using DV.

      IIRC, theforce.net is using either H.263 or Sorenson @ 320x240 at a relatively low bitrate. DV has a way higher constant bitrate (3.9Mbps?) and it's at 720x480 (ie the same size as DVD video).

      The point is, if you have DV video it doesn't make any difference what wrapper format it's in because the quality is the same.

  • view Quicktime (and other media formats) on Linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by halfelven ( 207781 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @05:49PM (#5245008)
    xinehq.de [xinehq.de]
    You need the latest beta, and you have to also get the Win32 codecs (Quicktime included). If not sure where to get the Win32 codecs from, ask on the mailing list.
    It works fine, it can play streaming material. It even has a Mozilla plugin.
    And it's not just Quicktime, you can play basically any multimedia format: DivX, DVD, SVCD...
  • Since Apple failed miserably with giving us a decent movie player. I'd be much happier if Quicktime was given to us as a normal codec "plugin" so they could be played with WMP or just about any other movie player for Windows.
    • Remember, Quicktime is a platform for serving up media of various codecs. Whenever you play "Quicktime video" in all likelihood you're playing Sorenson-compressed video through the Quicktime platform. Sorenson Video is the codec in this instance.

      Quit demanding that Apple should make you a movie player for free. If you want a high-quality Quicktime experience, buy a Mac. If you want to remain five years behind the times with regards to audio and video, stick with Linux.

      • Sorenson Video is the codec in this instance.

        Yeah, change that to "I wish to see Sorenson Video" as a codec plugin.

        Quit demanding that Apple should make you a movie player for free.

        Doh. They already are.

        What I'm asking for is that they'd skip the movie player, and just bring the codec, since they never knew how to make movie players for Windows anyway. :-)
        • Mind if I ask you a simple question?

          Why don't you fucking write one yourself? This [apple.com] should give you enough information to do so. If you are man enough, that is. Come on, I dare you.

          • Actually it's even easier than that.

            He says he uses windows, and here [apple.com] is the source code for writing a QuickTime player under windows.
          • HTTP 403 Forbidden. 'nuff said.
          • f that, why would a "man-enough" choose to write a pc of software to EXTEND the market of the Apple Corporation?

            Its obvious why Apple built ontop of *BSD && Mach, they dont get GNU's Freedom or atleast dont agree/care.

            Keeping their player off of GNU/Linux is an obvious attempt to avoid legitimizing GNU/Linux (for what little worth it really would be).

            Quicktime Player has not been ported for political/social reasons... so why would this person want to do it *for* them?

            • He was talking about how "crappy" the movie player for Windows was. And that they should just release a Sorensen codec plug-in for Windows (which Apple did, just not for the WMP or RP, but for -who would have guessed- Quicktime). Man, he doesn't know what Quicktime is, but you don't even have a clue what we are talking about.

    • Re:Please make Quicktime for Windows :-) (Score:4, Informative)

      by Drakonian ( 518722 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @06:19PM (#5245314) Homepage
      Well, it's Sorenson's codec, not Apple's. If you don't QuickTime player but just the codec, go bug Sorenson.
    • No, Apple didn't fail to make you a movie player. They didn't try. I've heard estimates on the order of 100 engineer-years to do a full port of QuickTime to *NIX. The Windows port took over a year more than originally scheduled, and requiried porting huge chunks of the MacOS Toolbox to Windows. Something equivalent would be required for *NIX, with an even bigger moving target. Plus there is LOTS of processor specific optimizations there.

      And how would that help Apple?
      • And how would that help Apple?

        Ben. Ben!! I'm surprised at you! It doesn't have to help Apple. It only has to help The Community!

        Say you're sorry now.

        ...jeez, bro, what were you thinking...?

      • Quicktime work fine thru Wine, and even better thru Codeweavers Crossover Plugin which gve you quicktime in your web browsers too. I've been using it for well over a year now.

  • I'm sorry... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by labratuk ( 204918 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @05:54PM (#5245077)
    ...if this sounds like a rather open ended question, but we have MPlayer playing pretty much any a/v codec on the planet right now, and we have decent video tools (esp. Cinelerra). What's stopping people getting together to make it possible for all the codecs being used universally?

    ie- So that you're able to open sorenson encoded files seamlessly in cinelerra, and encode/save out to various divx mutations.

    Come on people, we're so close!

    I unserstand that libavcodec does this with many files (mpeg derivatives), but not the *ahem* less legal ones.

    I can't wait until the day I plug a Firewire dv cam into a mandrake box, a dv cam icon pops up on the desktop and allows joe to edit away to his heart's content.
    • This is a bad, bad idea. Sorenson-encoded video is already extremely compressed; by re-encoding it as DivX, you have to go through another round of compression, making the video even worse quality.

      What you really want is to be able to import uncompressed video via Firewire (or DV-compressed video, like what the story mentions) and edit it from there.

      "I can't wait until the day I plug a Firewire dv cam into a mandrake box, a dv cam icon pops up on the desktop and allows joe to edit away to his heart's content."

      If you're willing to shell out $999 for an iBook, you can have this today. Cheers! Enjoy Gnome 2.2 (snicker)....

      • Yes I see, I just didn't think about the grammar when posting that, but it was meant as more of a general remark. Not specifically opening a sorenson and saving it as divx.

        What someone really needs to do is build into a NLE mpegtools, ie, being able to so simple chops & splices data frame by data frame without re-encoding.

        Or maybe MJPEG fills that niche well enough. *shrug*
    • That is the vision of GStreamer [gstreamer.net]. Progress seems fairly slow, but steady so far. I think GStreamer is even distributed with Gnome now. Hopefully GStreamer will soon mature to the point where gst-player can replace mplayer/xine as a general media player.

      • Apparently KDE decided to do with xine [xinehq.de] what Gnome wants to do with GStreamer [gstreamer.net]: a multimedia player infrastructure. Want your foo-bar KDE/Gnome application to play DivX? Just make the appropriate calls to the xine/GStreamer API on your system.
        GStreamer seems to be more ambitious towards video broadcast and stream video. But it's not quite ready yet for prime time (still feeling kinda alpha version).
        OTOH, xine is already production quality, has a working player and started to develop a video editing infrastructure.

        It will be interesting to watch how these projects evolve in the future. Both have interesting features, and have a promising look.
    • here [gstreamer.net].
      DirectShow on Win32 has quietly evolved into a multimedia scene graph similar to Quicktime, and GStreamer is the rather smarter effort on Linux.
      (see here [divx-digest.com] for an example of the clever tricks you can do in DirectShow just by accessing the scene graph with GraphEdit)

      Unfortunately, most people seem more interested in demanding obscure playback modules in MPlayer, rather then looking at the problem from an abstracted view.

      (OGRE [sourceforge.net] takes the same approach for 3D engines, but people would still rather look at Crystal Space. le sigh.)
      • "Unfortunately, most people seem more interested in demanding obscure playback modules in MPlayer, rather then looking at the problem from an abstracted view."

        Yes, that's the point! xine [xinehq.de] for KDE, and GStreamer [gstreamer.net] for Gnome are trying to implement precisely the same idea: have a generic multimedia infrastructure, and let any arbitrary application to make calls to it if it wants to play an A/V file.
        I agree, this is a far better approach than the monolithic player offered by other applications.

    • DV and Mandrake (Score:2, Informative)

      by madsdyd ( 228464 )
      Well, you can _almost_ do what you want. With Kino installed, you can plug in your DV cam and start editing away to your hearts content.

      I don't know if it is possibly to add icons automagically, but I guess it would be. No idea how to do it though?

      Mads Bondo Dydensborg

  • Broadcast Quality (Score:4, Informative)

    by cranos ( 592602 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @06:16PM (#5245259) Homepage Journal
    AS someone working in a Regional TV station I would love to be able to switch our production facilities away from the MS based systems we are using now and move them to a Linux based system.

    I am starting to write something [slashdot.org] for this myself but I would like to know how close we are to actually achieving this aim. I have looked at several of the packages on offer such as KDENLIVE [sourceforge.net] and Cinelerra [freshmeat.net] but none of them are what I would call studio ready.

    Well I keep hoping.

  • Apple's Legal Department (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Entropy_ah ( 19070 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @06:25PM (#5245375) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone else think that Apple is going to shit a brick over this? I'm sure they don't mind Linux users being able to view Sorenson encoded files because they arn't really loosing anything, Linux users just otherwise wouldn't view these files. But now people have an option to make quicktime moves without paying for Apple software. (I'm saying this assuming that Apple dosen't make any free Sorenson encoding programs)
    • The QuickTime file format has always been documented [apple.com] - there have been QuickTime content generating apps available on multiple platforms forever (in a past life I wrote some code to emit QuickTime VR movies for a 3D toolkit on Irix).

      The problem is always the codec used to encode the data - but if you've come up with a codec that doesn't infringe anyone's patents, why/how should they care? The problem is that to date, nobody in the OSS world has done so.
      • >The problem is that to date, nobody in the OSS world has done so.

        Well, in that case, I suggest we wrap this [berkeley.edu] with quicktime.

        Then we'll have the OSS QT codec everyone wants. Not to mention lossless video that's still compressed better than sound has ever been. Sweet.
      • if you've come up with a codec that doesn't infringe anyone's patents, why/how should they care? The problem is that to date, nobody in the OSS world has done so.

        Ogg Theora is free software that you can use without needing to pay royalties. It's based on VP3, and the VP3 patent owners have given up their patent rights so Theora can be fully free. (And I hope good things will happen to them as a reward.)

        Theora hasn't hit 1.0 yet; the current, alpha-quality release is the first milestone release. Plans are to release a beta in March 2003 and the final 1.0 in June 2003.

        http://www.theora.org/ [theora.org]

        steveha
    • From the blurb (can't get to the article) it sounds like there's no use of the Sorenson codec here. They're just putting the DV format video from the camera into a Quicktime wrapper, which is exactly what it was designed for.
    • If Apple see enough people using Linux for Quicktime they ought to release software native to the platform if it is showing signs of growth.

      This is the trouble with the current corporations, they seem to wait for someone else to create the market and then muscle their way in. The danger here I believe is losing out on the market and have some other company (or group) gain the share. Of course the alternative is to sue potential competitor out of existence...

      StarTux

  • "auto-split" is why! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why this is good and different is that Kino has an auto-split feature that Cinelerra doesn't have. Also no truly good Windows non-linear-editors have this feature. So now, if you need to capture say a long VHS tape or even a DV tape where scene capture isn't appropriate, and you need to edit the files in Windows as well, you just pop in the tape, specify 2 GB files (16000 frames), point Kino at a FAT32 formatted drive, hit capture and go away for an hour or two and audio and video will be in perfect sync in all files, This is very difficult to get right with large file capture. It's also much easier to feed these Quicktime files to any Windows app that can edit Quicktime much easier than it is with Kino's AVI files, so this is a big deal at least until it's possible to more in Linux than Cinelerra can do now and especially for those of us who need to create cros-platform files,
    • Matrox (Matrox.com) sells the RTX100, a real-time editing card which allows one to suck in as much DV as one wants, onto FAT32 or NTFS partitions, via their 'Infinite Capture' feature. This is aka auto-split. Of course, their product isn't free, but it freakin rocks!

  • Kino experiences (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Stranger ( 24022 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @06:36PM (#5245509)
    Over the past several months, I've been using Kino to edit together a wedding video for my brother-in-law and his wife. I did the original filming with two cameras, so I had some extensive editing to do. Wanting to get away from Windows and the 4GB file size limit, I decided to explore Kino.

    After some work setting it up, everything worked surprisingly well. DV capture (from a Sony TRV-950) was painless and the editing went pretty smoothly. I ended up having to create a separate audio track to dub over the entire video. It was at that point that I discovered a bug in Kino's dubbing feature. Because of the way audio was handled, there was a progressive desynchronization of the audio and video. The good news is that after posting some messages on their forum, the issue got fixed in the CVS (and I presume the new version incorporates the fix).

    I've been exporting the finished product (several gigs of DV) to VCD, and the results have been very satisfactory. All in all, anyone who wants to try editing DV video in Linux should at least give Kino a good try- the interface is clean and relatively intuitive and I was able to figure things out without a lot of trouble. Before using Kino, my only experience had been a little work with Pinnacle Studio 7.0.
    • The 4GB file limit was fixed in Windows back with NTSF and NT workstation. You're probably runnine ME, or have a FAT32 formatted drive.
      • Many video editing programs on Windows have trouble with >4GB (or >2GB) AVI files. There is an extension to the AVI file format that allows 64-bit file lengths, but not all Windows software supports it.

        In fact, Apple's own Quicktime framework cannot handle >4GB AVI files on Windows!

        I learned this the hard way when trying to compress a 6GB AVI file to Quicktime. The encoder did the worst thing possible - not only did it chop off the video as it went past the 4GB mark, it didn't give any kind of warning or error message either!
        • Yeah, QuickTime's AVI support hasn't every been THAT good. The large file thing was fixed in 6.1, which is only out for MacOS X at this point.

    • Re:Kino experiences (Score:2, Interesting)

      by denzombie ( 561408 )
      I just got kino running under Debian 3.0. It was a bit of a booger. Needed to upgrade to testing, then update the DVlib to an unstable version. Now, it works beautifully.

      I was able to show of with pride to my Mac coworkers who work with Final Cut Pro. They were impressed that I got DV working under GNU/Linux, but couldn't understand why I went to the trouble when FCP runs so well on Mac OS X.

      • Re:Kino experiences (Score:2, Informative)

        by captaineo ( 87164 )
        You might brag to them that the Linux DV system is much less likely to drop frames during FireWire capture or plaback (as long as you're using my dv1394 driver)... dv1394 is designed so that even if it drops a frame, which is unlikely with a properly-written player, the application can notify you immediately - so you can be sure your tapes come out looking good without having to check them over manually...

  • quicktime?? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by itzdandy ( 183397 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @07:00PM (#5245722) Homepage
    is quicktime the prefered format for video? i prefer Xvid(open source, high quality, high compression).

    its very nice to have so many options available, especially on linux now. i have been using crossover plugin to play quicktime movies on my linux box but now ill be able to play them native.

    good work.

    • Re:quicktime?? (Score:2, Informative)

      by adamhupp ( 29341 )
      Xvid is an MPEG-4 codec. Quicktime is a stream format. You could, theoretically, put an xvid encoded video into a quicktime file.

      -Adam
    • you remind me of a good point, quicktime is a streamable media, good for web content delivery. XVid does not currently stream, so the whole file must be downloaded.
  • Sure it's an excellent utlity for watching, editing, and manipulating video, including Quicktime, in Linux. But I would also recommend Codeweavers Crossover plugin which will give you quicktime in your web browser (supports Konqueror, Mozilla/Netscape 'Gecko' variety browsersd, and Opera) and on your desktop.

  • Of course (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gallir ( 171727 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @07:54PM (#5246243) Homepage
    Go to Bulma [bulmalug.net] (spanish).

    In Debian is basically:

    apt-get install qt6codecs

    If you have:

    deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main

    in your sources.list.

    BTW: why the parent was moderated "funny"?

  • Why the fuck (Score:2, Interesting)

    by C32 ( 612993 )
    Would anyone want to make quicktime videos on linux when there are much better OPEN codecs and containers (xvid/vorbis for video and audio, and ogg or even avi for the container)? I mean, the quicktime container and it's codecs (sorenson etc) are some of the most proprietary, least-supported media formats in existance! (except maybe realmedia). There are no good, simple "user" players for quicktime on linux ("user" meaning the user doesn't have to compile a bleeding-edge mplayer or xine and somehow make his/her probably illegally-obtained win32 codec dlls work with it), and the quicktime player on windows is horrendously ugly, slow and feature-crippled compared to all the free/open media players (and even WMP).

    • Re:Why the fuck (Score:5, Informative)

      by yomegaman ( 516565 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @08:48PM (#5246715)
      Quicktime has always been a completely open format, and is the industry standard for editing tools. Programs like xanim could open and play Quicktime since many years ago. Now, the Sorenson codec is proprietary, but if you're making your own video just don't use it. You'll want to keep the video in DV format anyway while you're editing, then at the end export it into any format you want. What is it with you guys, you act like the whole world revolves around surfing the web on your Linux box downloading LOTR trailers. Somebody makes those videos you know, and for them Quicktime is great. Stop all the hating.

  • shut up about DivX! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kz ( 4332 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @09:27PM (#5246986) Homepage
    To all of the above posters saying things like "why QuickTime when {DivX | MPEG4 | Ogg Tarkin | AVI} is so much {better | smaller | easier | open} ?" I'll tell you two things:

    1: When editing video you want the LEAST compression possible. BIG files are a PLUS. That's why this guy uses DV encoded files, it's the same compression done by his camera, so he loses nothing while capturing and editing.

    2: QuickTime isn't a compression, not even a file format, it's a software architecture. When he picked his camera, the choice of compression was made for him (DV), and when he chose the NLE (Cinestream), the file format was fixed (mov, quicktime's native format)

    This isn't about viewing video clips on the 'net, for that he'd reencode as MPEG4 after having his master tape.

  • Not for analog video (Score:3, Informative)

    by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:09AM (#5248204) Homepage
    It should be noted that Kino is only good for capturing/editing pure digital video streams.

    Analog sources such as those supported by Video4Linux are not supported.
    There is a V4L tab in Kino, but it is highly experimental.

    • That is true, but the world is moving towards digital capture. Even for stuff like taping broadcasts, more and more people use external inexpensive boxes that converts the analog signal to a DV signal, like the Canopus boxes do. Its $200 and gives much better quality and reliability as I understand it.

      Mads Bondo Dydensborg
  • HeroineWarrior has a click-through GNU GPL v2 license agreement for their downloads. Do any of the lawyers here (do any lawyers even real slashdot??) know if that would help make the GPL more enforcable?

    And Moderators, this isn't OT - Cinelerra is a video editing tool.

  • Ex-Quicktime programmer needs to Pro Edit (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mattr ( 78516 ) <mattr&telebody,com> on Friday February 07, 2003 @02:59AM (#5248607) Homepage Journal
    I can provide some more datapoints.

    I used Quicktime 4 as a porting layer to convert 7 man-years of Macintosh code to Windows 98. You can see some info and screenshots of the working application (a color pallette, and a layout for a school placement test)here [telebody.com].

    This was a wild, unsupported, dumb, nervewracking adventure that taught me a lot about Quicktime (which has of course continued to grow and is may be a different cat with Mac OS X for all I know). When it worked well (when the libraries really existed, not just saying they were there) huge chunks of code would just start working which was also fun.

    Quicktime for Windows brought a lot of the Macintosh toolbox calls, things you would think are part of the Mac OS, into Windows so you could call a huge number of them and they would work just like the Apple documentation said. I was able to use the Mac resource files after hacking some endian things and the Quicktime fonts looked much better than the Windows functions then too.

    Anyway it was amazing how Quicktime appeared to be a trojan to put half the MacOS into Windows but I guess Quicktime needed it all. If it was rewritten to run on BSD maybe we could enjoy Quicktime as a programming paradigm in Linux too.

    Since the software I was porting was a cross between Quark XPress and Adobe Illustrator (VXAStar, a layout program for "Shashoku" traditional analog printing press companies in Japan) it didn't need it but I even had a thing that could play movies in it. Quicktime is great because it was a whole integrated way of thinking about any kind of media, it was an API written by thoughtful people. So the API included things like knowledge about different color spaces, new audio codecs that might come out, and so on. So if your app would support Quicktime you could handle professional quality data (close to a megabyte per frame) or anything else.

    I haven't done programming for Linux video or Quicktime recently either so I don't know and most likely things have changed though I still have a copy of some of heroinewarrior's first stuff :), so I don't mean to disparage anything that may be out there. But I was developing this software while in a small NLE studio, a guy who had built his own Mac-based finicky NLE suite with an external RAID array.

    If you want to encode Sorenson for the web, we just need to be able to buy a Sorenson codec binary for linux.

    If you want to do studio work you probably will have a standalone system which is only used for that, with maybe hard disks partitioned with big blocks. The Mac (Premiere) system I saw was immensely powerful, like a Quantum Paintbox you could do photoshop or work in other programs then render it to disk, the biggest problems were:

    1) explaining to the customer what is possible, since you could do anything even just with AfterEffects, like creating clouds from nothing or rendering video in lots of layers.
    2) finickiness (don't install anything else on that machine and even so it might crash sometimes.. this was an 860AV I believe),
    3) you need to buy/steal a betamax deck (though we dreamed of going to DV then) and the RAID could only hold so much,
    4) rendering time was quick usually but you still had to provide a couch for the customer to fall asleep on at points (when many layers were used). Also
    5) You must use a very expensive, very fragile video board to get professional-quality video into the machine, just knowing all about them is a whole field of study and detective work.
    6) from a project I did last year I can tell you that using tapes from unknown sources is sheer hell and inevitably involves lots of cable swapping and signal testing. If DVD regionality and PAL/SECAM encoding can be handled through software (say write a DVD at the end of the session, though most places will want Pro DV tapes or Beta.. digital betacam being almost nonexistent in Japan) then you may see studios putting Linux boxes in the corner of the room for the "just in case" when you really need it.

    Now we seem to be there completely hardware-wise, but I doubt a linux software suite could be put together that could do as much yet (though maybe the film gimp would give AfterEffects a run for the money, I haven't tried it). It is completely conceivable that you could get pretty far with a few RAID arrays, a fast machine with tons of memory, and a pro DV deck. Maybe everyone is still buying avids but if analog starts working watch out!

    As I'm writing this I am sitting on 20 hours of DVCAM tapes and thinking about how to get an editting system set up.. to produce a few professional-quality tapes for sale. At the moment I am thinking of getting a small pro DV deck and dumping them into a couple of hard disks first, then trying out the software mentioned in this post. If anyone has any recommendations (no special hardware, I'll just at the end either print to another DV or DVD and from there to a Beta deck at a lab) I'd be grateful.

    Matt

    • Just for the record, my brother in law (Dave Huber) is a pro audio engineer and runs a voiceover company called Hotwax Recording in Manhattan. His setup is completely digital, Max OS X. Most people would solve my question above with "Avid" or "Mac". I'd like to see it on "Linux".

  • My experiences with Kino... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @06:17AM (#5248946)
    ...have been very good so far (up and to Kino 6.1), my experiences with Cinellera have been horrible.

    Kino is still missing the (in layman's terms) "parallel track" view of more than one video track that will let you to move stuff from one track to the other with the flick of the mouse; the problem is trying to do an "L"-cut (sound from frame A continues into frame B for a while) with Kino. Once that is taken care of, you will be able to do the most basic forms of editing with no problem.

    This is still no match for the stupidest Windows programs out there -- video just isn't there yet on Linux -- but given that Cinellera crashes about once every ten minutes, Kino looks like our best hope so far to at least get something done.

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