Welcome to the first post of my VLog, a video blog of the various things that interest me. Today we talk to Soeren Sandmann about his efforts to make projectors “Just Work”, the fruit of which has just landed in Fedora Rawhide.
This production was done using
Cinelerra,
Kino (DV to Ogg Theora post processing) and
The GIMP.I hope to have videos from time to time and will be setting up a dedicated blog for them in the future. The biggest factor right now for not producing more video is the state of Open Source and Free Software tools for video editing. Cinelerra is very capable but the UI is frustrating to work with. Anyone who can accelerate the development of
PiTiVi or produce a tool with a
UI similar to their advanced UI mockups will have my eternal thanks (and I will buy them beers whenever I see them).
[read this post in:
ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
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Please fix the mime-type of your vids so it launches Totem instead of asking me whether I want to download it. Thanks.
Comment by Bastien — January 30, 2008 @ 7:04 pm
I added a .htaccess file to a parent directory with this directive:
AddType video/x-theora .ogm .ogv
It didn’t work. Any suggestions?
Comment by J5 — January 30, 2008 @ 7:19 pm
fixed by using the .ogv extension
Comment by J5 — January 30, 2008 @ 7:33 pm
Go Søren!
Wow, for so long i´ve been wanting to use this funky character, finally a chance …
Comment by Rob — January 30, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
So… are you gonna help Greg out with fedoratv?
When talking about fedoratv with greg and looking at video editting tools that could be shipped in Fedora directly, I took a real hard look at kino.
Kino can be shipped in fedora in a way that limits it to dv capture, dv editting and ogg exporting.. by shipping it without ffmpeg support. Kino uses a series of import/export scripts and knows how to deal with a fallback if ffmpeg isnt available.
Here’s my problem.. I know of absolutely no way to convert a theora video back to dv that does not involve ffmpeg. There seems to be a missing module in gstreamer space to go in this direction. You can go the other way.. and in fact i’ve talked to the kino author specifically about using gstreamer method to export to theora instead of using ffmpeg.
Do you know of a way to do this.. convert theora into dv? If you can make this happen, then we’ll be able to offer kino to Fedora users so that they can mix and match theora clips with dv footage and re-export to theora. It’s not optimal…but that’s where we are.
-jef
Comment by jef spaleta — January 30, 2008 @ 9:25 pm
Hey J5,
turns out that ogv is not a known extension here in nautilus 2.21 and totem 2.21, probably my half updated ubuntu. .ogg usually is enough.
On the other hand, what’s the app shown? is that on upstream x.org (the upcoming release this march, 7.4 I think?) or is that a Fedora only thing?. It’s awesome.
Good luck with your vlog.
Comment by Diego Escalante Urrelo — January 30, 2008 @ 9:40 pm
Nice! Could you also talk Søren into writing something that allows for setting a default action upon pluggin in an external monitor? I fancy something like plugging in a projector and having Evince automagically going fullscreen in presentation mode on the projector and showing notes on the laptop or Totem automagically going fullscreen on the projector etc.
Alternativly, is there a git repository or something where we can follow Søren’s work and have a stab at it ourselves?
Comment by Simon Holm Thøgersen — January 30, 2008 @ 10:18 pm
Nice, but I had hoped for some hard-hitting questions from the blog owner.
How is it implemented, for which graphics drivers does it work, is it ready for distros or does it need more polishing? Etc etc…
Comment by Johan — January 30, 2008 @ 10:25 pm
Partly answering my own question about where to find the source for this work, I’ve found that gdk in Gtk+ has been extended with functionality provided by xrandr 1.2, see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439588 and http://lists-archives.org/gtk-devel/06374-monitor-and-projector-hotplug-aka-randr-1-2-support-for-gtk.html. But I’d still like to know which application that’s featured in the movie, is it just gnome-display-properties that has been enhanced?
Comment by Simon Holm Thøgersen — January 30, 2008 @ 10:34 pm
Bah, there it is
http://www.gnome.org/~ssp/randr/
Comment by Simon Holm Thøgersen — January 30, 2008 @ 10:43 pm
Btw it’s no longer “The GIMP”.. just GIMP.
Comment by Mukund — January 30, 2008 @ 11:22 pm
The application featured in the video is what will hopefully become gnome-display-properties in Fedora 9 and GNOME 2.24.
Applications will be notified when monitors are plugged in, so they can choose to go fullscreen or whatever.
Comment by Søren Sandmann — January 31, 2008 @ 12:52 am
Soeren should be writing up some details that I will post here. The reason I didn’t go into more depth was, well why? It was meant to be an amuse bushe (thats french cooking slang) before the main course of seeing this work in all the distros. Besides it is my first vlog and man was it painful to edit just that short clip. I’ll be storyboarding my next few productions and hopefully tools will get better. I might even do “seasons” of some topics where I shoot and edit a bunch of related blogs and release them over the year. Depends if it has to be timely or not and if I have enough time. Strange thing about life is the more you do the less time you have to do it ;-P
As for FedoraTV I don’t think I’ll have much time for improving it. I was going to use it but I couldn’t get my video uploaded. Such is the ways of Beta software. FedoraTV would be a good project for a summer of code student to hack on.
Comment by J5 — January 31, 2008 @ 12:53 am
Jef,
Ogg to DV should be a matter of setting ogg as the source pad (along with the demuxers) and setting DV as the output pad (along with the muxers). The biggest issue is DV has to be one of two sizes (I forget what they are off the top of my head). I’m not quite sure why Kino doesn’t just use the decoded stream as it’s editing format and why it has to convert to DV in the first place. Kino so far is pretty useless for editing though, given it doesn’t have tracks and has poor audio handling which is in my opinion 75% of making a good video. The things it does do well right now is import DV from a Mini-DV camera (well at least it was the only thing that worked) and it’s export to ogg options are dead on giving me five options – Best quality, High quality, Medium quality, Broadband quality and Low quality. High was the best bang for the buck. OggConvert gave me dials with audio and video quality from 1-10. No matter how long I tweaked it I couldn’t get the quality to be as good as Kino’s output at the same time keeping the file size low. So Kino did a good job of getting the defaults right in the case of ogg output.
Comment by J5 — January 31, 2008 @ 1:15 am
Jef, it could also be that reading DV is considered fine but writing it off limits so it is a bit of a pida. Of course Dirac 1.0.0 which is supposed to be used for post-production work could be used as the editing format (The Dirac 2.1.0 spec, which adds motion compensation and is more suited for internet distribution has just been finalized)
Comment by J5 — January 31, 2008 @ 1:55 am
J5,
The real problem here is that Kino is essentially in maintainence mode. The developer considers it “done”
PiTiVi should be the fully gst based tool in this space.. but its essentially a shell right now.
I’d have to look to see where things stand with Dirac and whether there is motivation left in kino development to deal with it.
I would imagine that gst doesn’t quite deal with it yet.. or do you know otherwise?
-jef
Comment by jef spaleta — January 31, 2008 @ 3:17 am
Hey, this is awesome
Not only the content, but I’m loooking forward to seeing more of your videos in the future too!
I was going to submit to digg, but then I figured if it got dugg you might not like the hit on your bandwidth etc? If you could get them on Fedora TV that would be awesome, perhaps Greg or somebody would be interested in helping out?
Jon
Comment by Jonathan Roberts — January 31, 2008 @ 4:36 am
Yeah, very cool!
I’ve been waiting for this ever since the announce of randr1.2 with the hotplugging stuff and then i read about the randr plans for fedora 9. Great to see this is finally getting implemented and i can’t wait for it to hit gnome.
Thank you very much for your work!!
Björn
Comment by baze — January 31, 2008 @ 6:14 am
> It was meant to be an amuse bushe (thats french cooking slang)
Comment by Emmanuel — January 31, 2008 @ 8:52 am
Feel free to dig. I’ve never hit my bandwidth limit. Would be nice to know if that is possible.
Comment by J5 — January 31, 2008 @ 9:50 am
Soren: amuse bushe? I guess you meant «amuse bouche». At first I thought that expression did not exist, but wikipedia made me realize it was a synonym expression of «amuse gueule»
John: hey, I’m glad that *someone* noticed my “advanced pitivi” mockups and likes them
Comment by kiddo — January 31, 2008 @ 9:57 am
[...] is a pleasure to see that my mockups I did about a year ago for PiTiVi were noticed and mentioned somewhere in planet gnome. I would also heartily recommend Eugenia’s excellent mockup (and similar to [...]
Pingback by Nekohay’blog » Blog Archive » the state of video editors 4 years later — January 31, 2008 @ 10:09 am
magical
simply magical, lets hope Guadec 2008 will be an easier affair for presenting.
Comment by Karl Lattimer — January 31, 2008 @ 11:19 am
I am programming the “Open Movie Editor”, its UI is structured similarly as the mockup, but it does not have the GTK shiny goodness.
But give it a try, and if you have problems with it or suggestions, please be sure to get in touch, I am always happy to help.
Cheers
-Richard
Comment by Richard — January 31, 2008 @ 7:41 pm
some suggestions to the tool:
- what about some animation when plugging it in? I mean, it does not look nice when the beamer is plugged in, the window just refreshs
- what about modes like: clone screen; extend screen; etc. the two devices also could be displayed different when using clone mode – like without space
Comment by pirast — February 1, 2008 @ 10:18 am
[...] Simon Holm Thøgersen wrote me to point out that Søren Sandmann is already will into this [...]
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