KF5 Dolphin Woes with Video Thumbnails

The Dolphin file manager from the KDE Frameworks 5 installation on my Kubuntu 16.04 system so far never showed any video thumbnails in preview mode. Strangely, when checking the available and enabled preview modules in Dolphin's preferences, all seemed to be fine. However, no previews...

Kdenlive: Rendering MP4 Video with Meta Data -- Odds and Ends

Do you also want to have your media player properly organize your rendered video files? After some trial and error, as well digging into ffmpeg code, I finally found out what meta data can be used for MP4 containers and how to correctly set Kdenlive project meta data...

Adventures in Ffmpeg Meta Data Writing to MP4 Containers

Venturing in the world of adding useful meta data to video files using ffmpeg gets us on really difficult terrain. It sort of feels like we're back in the early days of MP3 audio files. Not much hard documentation and everyone seems to say something else. Fortunately, a dive into ffmpeg's source code allowed me to surface with a simple list of meta data supported for MP4 containers.

Kdenlive UI: Show Me My Project Waste -- Odds and Ends

Jean-Baptiste is busy again, and again he is churning out another useful improvement to Kdenlive. This time, he's tackling your project waste...

Kdenlive UI: Advanced Editing Timeline Bar Buttons -- Odds and Ends

With the new timeline bar, Kdenlive now prominently shows its advanced timeline editing functions to make them more accessible. So what do these four (and slightly abstract) symbols do when clicked...?

Kdenlive UI: New Timeline Bar -- Odds and Ends

Yet even more Kdenlive UI polishing: the Kdenlive status bar just below the timeline has been cleaned up. The status bar now only (mostly) contains only controls that deal with the timeline appearance, such as zoom, showing video thumbnails, and so on. All the other stuff that was slowly filling up the status bar has now found home in the new timeline toolbar, with many new buttons showing up. So what are these good for...?

Kdenlive: Preview Rendering -- Odds and Ends

The Kdenlive developer Jean-Baptiste Mardelle is incredibly busy these days adding cool new features to the current development branch. So we now get preview rendering for smooth playback of our timelines, even with CPU-bogging effects applied. This really good stuff will show up later this year in the next 16.08 stable Kdenlive release. So what is this preview rendering?

Kdenlive: More Power, No Flimflam

Kdenlive really is a formidable video editor, undoubtedly rated P for powerful – and the pun on some S rating flimflam is on purpose.

So what is to be expected...?

Kdenlive UI: Good Moves, or ... Import Keyframes -- Odds and Ends

Some weeks ago, Kdenlive version 16.04.1 brought a revamped and improved keyframe import dialog. So what's new and how to import keyframes from a previous auto mask motion analysis?

Kdenlive UI: Selectively Disable Timeline Clip/Video/Audio -- Odds and Ends

Disabling clips
from clip context menu.

A recent Kdenlive update now makes it possible to disable individual timeline clips or clip groups completely without touching any selective audio or video suppression.

So far, Kdenlive did only allow video editors to selectively disable the audio part or alternatively the video part on a per-clip basis in the timeline.

Kdenlive UI: Insert Mode -- Odds and Ends

Now that timeline insert and overwrite operations have landed in the development version of Kdenlive, we finally get the long-time missing insert mode. Formerly, insert mode wasn't implemented at all, and the mode switch disabled in the user interface. So how do the two modes insert and overwrite work...?

Kdenlive UI: Timeline Insert & Overwrite -- Odds and Ends

Recently, new advanced editing operations have been landed in the development version of Kdenlive: so what are timeline zone insert and overwrite good for and how do they work...?

Kdenlive UI: Track Status LED -- Odds and Ends

As part of the new advanced timeline editing operations that have been landed in the development branch, Kdenlive now has new track status indicators. Each track got its own little signal LED. It can either be unlit, or red, yellow, or green. But what does this status actually signal...?

Kdenlive UI: Timeline Lift & Extract -- Odds and Ends

As part of an ongoing effort to make Kdenlive more appealing to professional users, a set of new timeline operations have landed in Kdenlive's development version. Thus, they will be released to the general public as part of the next stable version 16.08.0. So what are these new extract and lift edit actions good for...?

Kdenlive UI: Clip in Project Bin -- Odds and Ends

As part of the ongoing polishing of Kdenlive's usability, the existing function Timeline > Current Clip > Clip in Project Bin has been improved. So far, after selecting a single clip in the timeline, Clip in Project Bin simply selected the same clip in the project bin, with the clip monitor switching to this clip. But the playhead was reset to start and in/out points lost. If you happen to splice long clips a lot, as I do in my screencasting projects, you were probably constantly hunting for the correct out point to work from further...