Sound & Video

New Video Editor

There has been some discussion around editing your videos and I'm hopefully reporting an exciting new development for 2010. No not the Christmas hat that appeared on the VLC icon this year....

VideoLAN, the developers of the excellent VLC Media Player are working on a new free video editing package, VideoLAN Movie Creator.

I shall be watching this closely to see how it goes. Cool huh?

Video Editing / Video Drivers / Hardware Support

Hi, I'm helping a primary school in Lismore where all Year 5 and 6 kids have a HP 2140 Minibook each. They are using Jaunty. We have tried the following video editors:

Kino, Kdenlive, Lives, Avidemux, Open Movie Editor.

All of them crash at some point when importing, adding effects or whatever. There is no pattern to it. Kino for example, which is supported by and comes with Edubuntu, crashes any time you move / advance the movie or if you right click anywhere on the screen. We are not sure if it is a video driver problem or what. I loaded all the programs on a HP 8430 (with 4GB ram - the minis have 2GB) and have similar problems. Is there anyone in your group who can help with this? I really want to promote Ubuntu to schools but it is difficult when a basic requirement isn't up to scratch and the kids cant use the webcam.

As the problem happens across different applications it looks to be a hardware issue.

Linux - Music to Your Ears!

As a (very) amatuer musician I've often wanted to experiment with electronic music creation.

Linux, Rosegarden, Lilypond, Jack and Fluidsynth/Qsynth, along with a Digital Piano for Christmas, have finally made this little dream come alive.

Broadcast TV on Your Computer

I didn't know it until about a month ago, but there's this thing called DVB-T, a standard for digital video broadcasts (the "DVB" bit) by terrestrial broadcasters (the "T" bit). You can get really cheap little USB devices to receive and decode these broadcasts, and Gary brought one of them in to the meeting before last.

Video Editing under linux

Hi All,

Just thought I'd open a thread for us to provide suggestions, links and recomendations to open source video editing solutions. I'd prefer to stick to linux as this is the Club Linux website, but I know a few people are interested in making stuff work on their Microsoft machines.

I couldn't remember the name of the gnome video editing project today, so here it is:

http://www.diva-project.org/

Opening up my cheap MP3 player...

Cheap Portable Audio - OpenI expect there are a fair few of you who have bought one of those cheap MP3 players from The Good Guys or WOW. I know I have one which cost me about 30 bucks and plays half an hour of audio which gets me to work and back on my bicycle.

Webcams

I've just had a friend ask me about webcams, which I've never used before. This document claims "many cameras work out-of-the-box". Does anybody have any real world experience with this? Brands of hardware to recommend or avoid? I notice Ubuntu has Video4Linux installed by default, and a great big button marked "Detect devices" in the Ekiga video preferences dialog. Is it really that easy?

How Not to Be Seen

At Software Freedom Day, Hugh mentioned the burgeoning art form of machinima, and I played an example of a music mashup. Well, here's a machinima mashup (try saying that after a few shandies), combining Monty Python's "How Not to be Seen" sketch with the first-person shooter game, "Halo", to humorous effect.

Note that this is a YouTube video, which requires the proprietary Flash browser plugin. To view it in free software, follow the instructions here

MythTV

Tom's Hardware has reviewed MythTV and concludes:

"Perhaps the most profound and telling advantage to MythTV [over Windows XP Media Centre Edition] is that its status as a community-based product means anyone can lend a hand in the development process. Possible contributions range from suggesting new and improved features, to creating and implementing new components. In fact, that is how many of the bundled plug-ins and add-ons found their way into the existing MythTV suite, and many more fol

Making YouTube Work for You

YouTube is great. It provides an easy way for non-technical people to share video clips. The downside is that it does so by streaming the video in a proprietary format. That's bad news for people with low-bandwidth Internet connections, or who want to avoid using proprietary or (depending on local laws) legally grey media players. Wouldn't it be great if you could download videos from YouTube and watch them at your leisure in a friendly file format? Well, you can using a couple of simple command-line tools...

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