New PPAs for Kdenlive on (*)ubuntu

For those on (*)ubuntu-based systems, three new PPAs maintained by the Kdenlive project offer quick access to the most recent stable Kdenlive, as well as to the next upcoming stable version and the current development version. Very importantly, these PPAs also come with corresponding MLT, ffmpeg, and frei0r packages. In particular, some recent Kdenlive features will only work with very recent MLT packages.

• kdenlive-stable: the most recent offical stable release. For production use.
• kdenlive-testing: the feature-frozen upcoming Kdenlive stable release. If you run into problems with the current stable, try this if a fix is already available. Also, this gives you early access to bug fixes in advance of the next stable release. May be used with great caution also for production, especially within a bug-fixing release cycle, such as version 16.04 to 16.04.3.
• kdenlive-master: bleading-edge Kdenlive from git master. Contains new features, fixes, and probably also bugs.

Please note that the ffmpeg package in these repositories is restricted due to licensing restriction. It thus lacks some video and audio encoders.

VLC-Qt Woes ... SMPlayer to the Rescue

A recent upgrade of my video editing station causes a really annoying regression in VLC+Qt. I'm using Kubuntu (15.10 as of this writing) as it is a well-done KDE-centric distribution that is quickly installed and KDE works right out of the box. Unfortunately, the recent upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.5.3/KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 causes VLC to only show a small portion of any video frame. So I needed some remedy...

Shuttle Crash: X11 & Qt 5.4

I've recently upgraded my Kubuntu installation to 15.10 ... just to find out that pressing any button of the ShuttlePro crashes Kdenlive. After some digging I found out that Qt 5.4 in combination with X11 are the culprits here. The ShuttlePro gets integrated as a pointing device by X11, then Qt dumps core trying to dispatching Shuttle events happily into the great void...

Kdenlive 15.x, Kubuntu, and the Contour ShuttlePro

ShuttlePRO v2

Roughly one-and-a-half year ago I got myself a nifty ShuttlePro v2 for editing video. In the meantime, the video editor Kdenlive as well as the system platform (K)Ubuntu have both undergone a lot of updates and changes. In particular, Kdenlive has now moved to the recent KDE Framework 5 (KF5) platform (as of this writing). A recent disk hiccup allowed me to install my video & audio station from scratch. So how do I get my ShuttlePro v2 working again?