The Open Video Conference is happening now. My earlier post about Ogg Theora was intended to be somewhat objective about one corporate perspective regarding patents. In truth, I have been rather indifferent about Theora. However, with the adoption of Ogg Vorbis+Theora in HTML5 <video> implementations, the adoption by major sites, and the major improvements to the encoding library Thusnelda, I have become a fan. Also, I do have confidence that Fluendo and Red Hat legal consultations have vetted potential submarine patent issues.

Therefore, in this spirit, and in the spirit of the Open Video Conference, I am giving support for Ogg Theora a greater priority in MLT and therefore Kdenlive. In the releases thus far,  there was a major memory leak in the MLT avformat encoding plugin when encoding to Ogg Theora with Vorbis. This is now fixed, and the fix will become visible to most users in the Kdenlive 0.7.5 release. Next, I need to work on a new plugin to provide better support for Ogg source clips.

Made with Kdenlive 0.7.4

MobiTV is in the March Madness mix with our first offering for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It’s in the iTunes store now for $4.99
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=307864832&mt=8

Take a look at some of the key features on this app:

• Live WiFi coverage of all tournament games (up to 4 games simultaneously
• Audio coverage if you’re on 3G and EDGE
• Video highlights
• Game recaps
• Real time graphical bracket with updates on game match ups, regions and scores
• Exclusive CBSSports.com Edge Matchup game previews, including team-by-team analysis and matchup comparisons
• Breaking tournament  news coverage
• Box scores and team stats

And, check out our ink in USA Today:
http://blogs.usatoday.com/technologylive/2009/03/live-sports-are.html

While MLT has always had the ability to composite image sequences of PNG or Targa files containing alpha channels, creating these animations is not so easy. There are a number of good 3D tools like Blender, but there are not many options that are easy and when 2D is just fine. One of the most popular tools is Flash, not just for web graphics, but also for broadcast and post-production. Today, I played around with swfdec to generate images from Flash .swf files. For a long while, I was under the impression it would not export the alpha channel, but I was wrong. Today, I made a proof-of-concept with some standalone code using swfdec and MLT. I made a very short video to show a result: mlt_swfdec_demo.mp4. I have yet to make the MLT module, but it should be easy.

In my last post about MLT, I mentioned that its release coincided with the completion of a commercial project. From April to July, I developed a broadcast playout server called Orion for C4IP Broadcast Innovation, whose first customer is Netherland's SLAM!FM's new television channel, SLAM!TV. Somes you can view the channel on this link. This system utilizes my (non-free) BlueFish444 SDI output module for MLT. This version of that module now supports embedded audio - embedded in the SDI stream, that is. Other interesting things about it is that the video server daemon uses the Ruby bindings for MLT and Ext JS for the web UI. Well, I could go on quite a bit about it, but I want to make a demo video for that.

Just as exciting, this 0.3.2 release coincides with the 0.7.0 release of kdenlive, which has been rewritten for Qt 4 and KDE4 technologies. I want to thank its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, for all of his hard work. He really outdid himself!

Both of these projects have really pushed the limits of MLT exposing problems that have been addressed. The resolution to these inspires a lot of confidence about the ability to handle new problems and address shortcomings. It is really nice to have turned the corner to spending the majority of my effort now on MLT and not Kino. It is also nice to work again with other developers on a video editor instead of soloing on Kino. While Jean-Baptiste and I have shouldered the hard, code-level work, we have attracted a number of contributors and not just on the code, but also things like testing, support, and web site maintenance. Not to mention, we get to rely on the hard efforts of people working on Qt, KDE, FFmpeg, LADSPA, Sox, frei0r, and surely others - this project really is a great culmination of the many top projects and frameworks that the Free/Open Source Software movement has to offer.

Another new release I made is libraw1394 v2.0.0. This is the primary user space library to the FireWire/IEEE 1394 subsystem on Linux. If you are using a recent Linux distribution, you might have run into some problems with the introduction of a new kernel subsystem, code name "juju." Officially, it is named "firewire" while the legacy but arguably more stable (due to maturity) subsystem is named "ieee1394."

If you use Fedora 7 or newer, since Red Hat sponsored this subsystem rewrite, you already have a compatible libraw1394. However, most other distributions that converted over to firewire have failed to update libraw1394 to the "juju" branch. Some distributions enable both subsystems leading to more confusion.

I made this new, official version of libraw1394 work with either subsystem transparently to the user. All you need to continue to do is to be mindful of the correct permissions to your related /dev nodes. For ieee1394, this is /dev/raw1394. For firewire, one of the features is more granular security, you can just give read/write access to the appropriate /dev/fwN node that corresponds to your camera or other video device -- if you can figure out which one that is. ;-) Please file a bug with your distribution to upgrade libraw1394!

I never wrote here yet about MLT. MLT is a project Charlie Yates and I started in November, 2003 as the basis of a video server for a television broadcaster. It quickly came into its own as a media processing and authoring framework library. It is now best known as the engine for the kdenlive non-linear video editor for Linux. Yeah, that's how powerful it is. It has a complete object model representation for a multitrack video project with filters and transitions and an API for manipulating and (de)serializing the model.

My activity level dropped off in late 2004, picked up only a little in 2005, and then subsided again. For the past 1.5 years I have had the pleasure of working with it again to support the kdenlive effort. This was a decision that coincided with the Kino 1.0 release, marking the end of its active development. Tonight, I am proud to release the 0.3.0 version as a checkpoint for a commercial project I recently completed, which I will write about soon. Here are the release notes.