12jan11

= 12-Jan-2011 LUG meeting notes =

We held the January Linux Users Group (LUG) meeting 12-Jan-2012 from 17:30 to about 19:15 in the Council Room. The subject of this 6th LUG meeting was home video editing under Linux.

kdenlive video editing software
I demonstrated this on a home laptop (Dell Studio 1537 w/P8400 CPU dual core) using the Linux software 'kdenlive' (which is KDE based but will run on other desktops such as Gnome/LXDE if appropriate KDE library dependencies are added).

We displayed the laptop output on the Council Room big screen, so everyone could try to follow what we were doing.

After the meeting I sent Eugenio an email with a list of other Video editors in addition to kdenlive [with links, and also tutorials on kdenlive]. I can also send a copy/paste of the video editing application list from that email to other's in the LUG if interested in learning what is available. Just let me know.

Features demonstrated in kdenlive during the LUG were:


 * create a stationary title,
 * do transitions between videos clips,
 * add a different audio track to a video,
 * put a small videos within a larger video,
 * import a still image and pan and zoom across the still image,
 * put a scrolling title within a video.
 * rendering the video to an MP4/MPG

I expressed the opinion that the specific 'kdenlive' software I was demonstrating was not suitable for cutting massive 1 hour or longer satellite TV recorded videos, where instead the Linux software program dvbcut was more appropriate for that.

Inputing video data from video camera
We also tried to import video from a video camera of Eugenio's over firewire interface to my laptop using the kdenlive software. That failed to work, and it appears there is a bug or improper setup in my kdenlive. We did succeed in copying a very nice video from Eugenio's video camera using a Linux terminal and the Linux application/command dvgrab with root permissions (root was needed due to a permissions problem with the regular user setup (?) ). We were short of time, and so we were not able to investigate that permissions problem further.

In my case at home I have a video camera with a USB interface, and my camera appears as a 'hard drive' when I plug it in to my PC (which means a drag/drop of video clips from camera to computer). I don't have permissions problems with my home setup.

Alessandra and Eugeno after the meeting notes
After the meeting Alessendra and Eugeno tried to apply some of the things learned in this meeting. They succeeded to grab some video from the old SONY videocamera through firewire using dvgrab and kdenlive. They solved the problem of the permission on device /dev/raw1394.

Ubuntu uses UDEV for the devices and creates the devices at runtime. When the device /dev/raw1394 is created it has permissions: crw-rw 1 root root 171, 0 2011-01-16 18:59 /dev/raw1394

To avoid running the programs as root, we created a group "firewire", we added the users that shall be able to use the firewire to that group and finally we changed the group of the device to "firewire":

crw-rw 1 root firewire 171, 0 2011-01-16 18:59 /dev/raw1394

To make the group of the device persistent through reboots, they found the solution in this ubuntu forum.

So, they created the file /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules with the content:

# IEEE1394 (firewire) devices # Please note that raw1394 gives unrestricted, raw access to every single # device on the bus and those devices may do anything as root on your system. # Yes, I know it also happens to be the only way to rewind your video camera, # but it's not going to be group "video", okay? KERNEL=="raw1394", GROUP="firewire" KERNEL=="dv1394*", GROUP="video" KERNEL=="video1394*", GROUP="video"

In which also the two groups of devices "dv1394*" and "video1394*" have the group changed to "video" (this two lines are likely not necessary).

This solution can be helpful also in case of running a virtual machine on a physical device without the need to be root.

Edited video with kdenlive
Back to the meeting - The meeting attendees then (on the laptop) did a very minor edit of this firewire transferred video clip from the camcorder using kdenlive.

Concluding notes
This was a very 'limited' subject LUG in that we only talked about that specific video editing topic. We can repeat this some other time, and of course we can open up the future LUG meetings to a much wider topic as desired by the membership in the future.