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?

Contour ShuttlePRO Linux Woes

Contour's ShuttlePRO v2 multimedia controller surely is a fine piece of hardware which I like very much. However, the device developers at Contour messed up with the USB HID profile for sure. Unfortunately, in Linux this causes shuttle and jog events to get lost from time to time ... so I started to investigate...

Kdenlive, Kubuntu, and the Contour ShuttlePRO v2 Jog Dial

Cuts the video, as well as the mustard:
ShuttlePRO v2 by Contour Inc.

While today computer mice are almost ubiquitous input devices at least for the larger personal computers, it is sometimes much better to (additionally) go for a special-purpose input device. Such specialized devices are much more convenient when working, for instance, with video and audio. (Re)Winding forth and back through the footage is easy, while mice are not exactly the best tool, erm, at hand.