[HN Gopher] State of Kdenlive
___________________________________________________________________
State of Kdenlive
Author : f_r_d
Score : 317 points
Date : 2026-04-18 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kdenlive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (kdenlive.org)
| popcar2 wrote:
| Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its
| stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking
| the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with
| a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...
| Doohickey-d wrote:
| Changing project framerate is apparently quite a hard problem,
| even DaVinci Resolve when you change it, warns you that you
| cannot change it for that project again.
|
| Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to
| specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the
| project framerate.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Interesting that they went to visit the Blender offices,
| considering Blender still has it's own video editor (that seems
| to be ramping up on receiving improvements as of late too) which
| is basically a "competitor" (as far as FOSS has competitors) to
| Kdenlive.
|
| I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there
| plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the
| two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video
| editing?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Open source projects do not necessary see alternatives as
| "competitors" if they don't market/sell their software.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Great work responding to the only point I tried to make as
| weak as possible, and even provided an explanation for why it
| isn't "correct" in the first place...
| nathanmills wrote:
| Calling FOSS devs "competitors" is such a corporate-minded
| statement that completely misses the point. FOSS devs all
| work together to achieve a common goal and don't see other
| projects as competitors, they see them as friends.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I agree, that what I literally tried to qualify it...
| Goddamn some of you seem to write comments with the sole
| purpose to disagree with the smallest of things.
| elteto wrote:
| Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a
| thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can
| absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We
| have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because
| of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts
| gathering more attention/contributions because of better
| governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.
| darkwater wrote:
| Yes, but this is not a case of project hard fork, not
| even a soft fork. They are two completely unrelated
| projects. People contributing to KDE would probably not
| contribute to Gnome for a variety of reasons - and vice
| versa - and it's perfectly fine. One aspect of open
| source is biodiversity.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Blender is a wild untamed beast of a thousand panels. Those who
| wrangle the beast are wise and powerful. But they became that
| was from the journey. Kdenlive is a much more approachable
| quest for someone who is just entering the dungeon.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| What's great about Blender, is that if you learn the UI,
| controls and hotkeys for the purposes of 3D, you can
| basically use the same UI, controls and hotkeys for video
| editing, and vice-versa of course :)
|
| People overplay how unfriendly it is nowadays too, very far
| from how it was a decade ago, when it was really hard to
| understand how the UI and UX worked.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Oh, don't get me wrong. I love it at tinker with it
| regularly. But power comes with complexity. It's always a
| trade off.
| Narishma wrote:
| It's been ages since I last tried Blender, is it still
| unusable without a numpad?
| eichin wrote:
| yeah, my one use of kdenlive has been to slap an on-screen
| telemetry track over a video - and it worked great for that,
| speaking as someone who has no interest in video editing :-)
| longitudinal93 wrote:
| After trying all the alternatives I can say that Kdenlive has
| become my goto for video editing. It's so great to see the team
| adding amazing new features and optimizing sub-systems. Well
| done.
| aleda145 wrote:
| I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is
| much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a
| beginner, which is such a fun feeling!
|
| I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my
| side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my
| tech stack FOSS when I can.
|
| Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain
| though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.
| dadoomer wrote:
| I've used Kdenlive for years. I'm someone who only needs video
| editing every once in a while, but even then I definitely
| recommend learning it.
| echelon wrote:
| Is Kdenlive owned/part of KDE?
|
| What's the story with KDE?
|
| How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial
| (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership
| changes?
|
| Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate
| (or better - steer) those changes?
|
| How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did
| Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of
| Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs.
| Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
|
| Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is
| not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously
| curious.)
|
| Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a
| bit and want to dive in again soon.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Google
| freedomben wrote:
| > *Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment?
|
| I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with
| you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super
| Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc.
|
| If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with
| KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a
| more "just works" kind of experience.
|
| Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable
| general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to
| start.
| lunar_rover wrote:
| > How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is
| commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several
| ownership changes?
|
| KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence
| after legal dispute.
|
| > Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to
| incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
|
| It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6.
|
| > How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did
| Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time
| of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu
| vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
|
| GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come
| to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS.
|
| > Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This
| is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously
| curious.)
|
| Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles
| about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE.
| GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more
| features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I
| also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.
|
| Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime
| since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG.
| You'll probably miss macOS application bundles.
|
| > Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for
| a bit and want to dive in again soon.
|
| Personally I like Fedora.
| f_r_d wrote:
| KDE is a community (this year it turns 30!) and Kdenlive is
| part of it. Visit the website and read more about it.
|
| Regarding you Qt question, there is the KDE Free Qt Foundation,
| more info:
| https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
|
| I cannot tell you which DE to choose, I guess try them both and
| use what you like.
|
| KDE distros that work well, try Arch (and derivatives like
| CachyOS), Fedora and there is also KDE Linux (but that is still
| alpha)
| Pay08 wrote:
| Kdenlive is part of KDE, yes.
|
| I don't know what you mean by "story", but KDE is a collection
| of software more or less (emphasis on the less, at least
| compared to Gnome) interlinked with each other.
|
| Qt specifically has the LGPL as a non-commercial license for
| open-source projects. This is part of a deal they made with KDE
| when it changed hands a while back.
|
| Qt is being actively developed, but I don't believe KDE has any
| influence on it. They updated the entirety of their stack to
| Qt6 a year ago, they can definitely incorporate the changes.
|
| KDE and GNOME generally don't care about each other. As for my
| personal opinion, Gnome's problems have only gotten worse in my
| experience, but perhaps in ways that don't matter to the
| average user.
|
| Gnome if you like a MacOS-style UI, KDE Plasma if you prefer
| the Windows-style.
|
| Generally, any distro will do. Rolling-release ones, or stable
| ones with a shorter update cycle (like Fedora) will get new
| features faster, but even Debian has KDE Plasma 6 nowadays.
| opan wrote:
| Personally I use Sway. I wouldn't recommend GNOME. KDE seems
| okay from what I've used of it on SteamOS, and I have a few
| friends who seem to like KDE as well.
|
| For a distro, maybe Arch or Fedora. Be aware with Fedora that
| it's more work than most distros to get proper media playback
| of certain codecs working, due to some sort of fear of patents.
| You have to replace a bunch of packages and it took me a while
| of messing around when I set up Fedora on an HTPC before I got
| the expected performance with various videos. I run Guix System
| on my personal machine, but it's pretty advanced and niche, so
| probably wouldn't recommend it to a new user.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I can't answer all of those but I personally prefer KDE to
| Gnome, and Fedora KDE or Kubuntu are the best. I like Fedora
| KDE.
| kombine wrote:
| I unfortunately have to use GNOME on my work laptop with Ubuntu
| 24.04 and it is honestly a pain compared to my personal
| computers running Plasma. The comparison is not entirely fair
| because I am pitching GNOME from 2024 to the latest version of
| Plasma, but the difference in UX is night and day. UI is
| smoother and more fluid, I can configure my system exactly how
| I want it to be.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to
| incorporate (or better - steer) those changes
|
| The relationship between the two orgs is currently healthy.
| They have different needs, but collaboration innl the Free Qt
| Foundation has been productive of late and hasn't hit major
| roadblocks.
|
| The annual Qt Contributor meetup and KDE events are semi-
| regularly co-located. KDE people help maintain a few of the
| modules, or rank as biggest external contributors.
|
| It's a relationship that always deserves active maintenance but
| has been holding steady overall.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I don't have much to add other than to say Kdenlive works great
| on Windows and probably MacOS too. Shouldn't be a surprise as
| QT has historically been one of the better cross platform GUI
| libs of the past 20+ years.
| visiohex wrote:
| Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more
| capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the
| overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of
| DaVinci Resolve. Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS
| for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an
| incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing
| to see how far open-source video editing has come.
| nathanmills wrote:
| Or with Tenacity insead of Audacity for the 100% invasive free
| software setup!
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I thought they rolled back those changes in a hurry.
| freedomben wrote:
| Same. They really thread that needle well IMHO. I _choose_ to
| use Kdenlive over paid options, not because I have to, but
| because I _want_ to. It 's quality software, and it being free
| (in both aspects) is a dream come true.
| BodyCulture wrote:
| Be careful with any serious project, this software most
| certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since
| many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able
| to understand how important stability for media creation
| software really is. Especially small and independent artists
| should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional
| risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an
| advanced project state has a high potential of total
| destruction.
|
| Choose wisely! Resolve is available for very little money and
| not only a much safer choice, but you will also learn to use an
| industry standard tool and might be able to monetise that skill
| one day.
|
| Kdenlive is a hobbiest project and is probably still ok for
| occasionally splitting a downloaded YouTube video or converting
| your OBS recordings, but never should you remotely think about
| using it for a project where you need to rely on your tools.
|
| The developers are not warning you enough, instead still trying
| to market this software as kind of a serious competitor to pro
| software, so I do that as a service for the aspiring video
| editor, taking your downvotes proudly as the price honest
| people have to pay.
|
| Yes, obviously I write from experience.
| squigz wrote:
| This argument would be a lot more convincing if you linked to
| issues or something.
| SamPatt wrote:
| I can second the sentiment, I have had kdenlive crash on me
| several times without saving.
|
| I still use it because it's great for quick and simple
| things, and I save frequently, but it is extremely
| frustrating when it happens.
| coldtea wrote:
| The parent does not want (or claims) to produce a report on
| Kdenlive's reliability or lack thereof.
|
| He merely comments on it. Those interested either already
| know (and agree or disagree) or can find out with a test
| run.
| rpdillon wrote:
| So my son and I have used Kdenlive quite a bit and we've
| never had it crash. That's why I was asking for
| specifics: it would be interesting to know what
| circumstances lead to crashes, even if it's just a hunch.
| sheiyei wrote:
| Based on your comment I guess you have never used Premiere
| Pro (and never learned ctrl + s)
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| premiere pro is still hugely unstable but think kdenlive is
| somehow even worse if you can believe it. It is basically
| unusable.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Arguments like this are much more compelling if you cite
| specifics rather than giving us your own conclusions.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Kdenlive being crash prone is a known thing, but for the
| parent to say the devs don't care goes too far.
| coldtea wrote:
| Would it be any better if they cared but still couldn't
| tame them in a 25 year old project?
| array_key_first wrote:
| Yes, it's complex software that has to interact very
| closely with the hardware and it's written in C++.
|
| Those aren't excuses, but they are explanations. The
| competition from Adobe crashes a lot, too. It's not
| necessarily a competence or money thing.
|
| Also, the windows taskbar in windows 11 crashes a couple
| times a day for me. And Microsoft is one of the biggest
| tech companies in the world. And, I'm assuming, very
| talented engineers worked on that taskbar.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Some very talented engineers work at Microsoft, that much
| is clear. Whether any of them work on the new parts of
| Windows 11 is less clear...
| coldtea wrote:
| AI will vibecode it to Windows Vista quality!
| kouosi wrote:
| I don't think they vibecode the core of windows though.
| From what I heard particularly (from osdev community) the
| core of windows is really good and well structured.
| kjuginonohih wrote:
| So it will become... good?
|
| "Vista bad" comments on a forum supposedly frequented
| mostly by IT people is just plain ridiculous. If you
| think "Vista bad, 7 good" then you clearly need to
| reevaluate your understanding of computer technology.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| You make it sound like the same bugs have been there for
| 25 years. That again isn't fair given that many, many,
| many new features have been added to the project since
| its inception in 2002. They are also somewhat at the
| mercy of the MLT framework that they depend on for a lot
| of the heavy lifting.
|
| And they do fix crash bugs. All the time. You can see
| that in the announcements they put out after each
| release. I think the general perception is that it is
| indeed becoming more robust as time goes on as new
| developers have come on board to help. The project is
| gaining momentum that it hadn't really had before.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| If they cared the issue wouldn't have gone on for a
| decade or more.
| kalaksi wrote:
| > Especially small and independent artists should absolutely
| avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project
| failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project
| state has a high potential of total destruction.
|
| I can't really comment on kdenlive, but this sounds kind of
| overly dramatic to me. I mean, I hope you save and take
| regular snapshots/backups in case your disk, RAM or just
| human error destroys anything substantial.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| For what it's worth, while I haven't found kdenlive (or
| shotcut, based on the same underlying toolkit) to be 100%
| stable, I've had significantly fewer lost-work incidents with
| kdenlive than I did with Premiere Pro. The frustration of
| Premiere's instability was the main thing that drove me to
| open-source software.
|
| I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good
| feeling of how they compare, but I _have_ experienced a
| couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I
| believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an
| Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be...
| discouraged, I 'll say, by the Resolve community due to known
| stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as
| well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for
| kdenlive.
|
| What I will say is that I _personally_ prefer Shotcut to
| kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the
| actual media toolkit /editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut
| has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also
| seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more
| featureful. I think most people should try both because it
| probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Comparing usability/stability of premiere against anything
| is kind of putting your finger on the scale lol
| array_key_first wrote:
| Right, but it is the SOTA and the sort of poster boy of
| everything kdenlive competes with.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Resolve/Resolve Studio and FCPX have significant
| presences as well.
|
| I'd say its closest "competitors" are really Resolve and
| iMovie (much more robust than iMovie but same market more
| or less) since anyone who's doing this professionally is
| going to pay for Avid/Premiere/Resolve Studio/maybe FCPX
| and not use kdenlive. Resolve is more geared towards
| casual use and hobbyists, while still being powerful in
| its own right (and free, of course).
|
| Premiere is a (finicky) subscription based professional
| tool. kdenlive will never be a replacement for that and
| doesn't strike me as an attempt at one.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Is it? I'd say in the higher end that would be Media
| Composer.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Premiere is in the unique position of being the oldest
| video editing suite on the market - the first version was
| released in 1991! Much as with Photoshop, this sort of
| automatically makes it the gold standard.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Avid/1 was released in 1989. And there were others before
| it, although I think often on more proprietary or niche
| hardware (Avid/1 was Mac already).
|
| Things like that:
| https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/lucasfilm-originals-the-
| editd...
|
| I think Media Composer always had a lead in feature film
| / TV. It's possible Premiere Pro had a lead in other
| markets.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Even if they were the oldest NLE, that does not
| automatically make them "the gold standard."
| blindstitch wrote:
| I agree that this software is not ready for wide adoption in
| industry. Crashes are 5-10 times more common than premiere,
| FCP, avid, or resolve. I use it to make short instructional
| videos with V/O, which it is a godsend for- a massive
| improvement over the NLE options that existed before
| kdenlive. It is capable but stability is a major issue.
| blindstitch wrote:
| Also, what many of the computer programmer people here
| downvoting will not understand is that interrupting
| creative flow with crashes is not an acceptable cost of
| doing business.
|
| Film industry people who work 50 hour weeks editing video
| give negative fucks about what OS it's on or whether they
| can open a python console. They do not see submitting bug
| reports on github as a stimulating intellectual exercise.
| They need it to work without a crash for 50 hours a week,
| and that's why their workplaces take the $1000/seat/year
| hit. Same reason you see auto mechanics spending $200 for
| one snap on wrench instead of a whole harbor freight set.
| egypturnash wrote:
| > Also, what many of the computer programmer people here
| downvoting will not understand is that interrupting
| creative flow with crashes is not an acceptable cost of
| doing business.
|
| god I wish Adobe understood this
| charcircuit wrote:
| Were you using the AppImage / Flatpak of it? Backwards
| policies of Linux distros that allow them to randomly change
| the dependencies of kdenlive made it unstable since they were
| using bad versions of dependencies with it.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| A bit dramatic for telling us you don't bother to save your
| work. No matter if it's avid, davinci or premiere they all
| crash from time to time.
| pubby wrote:
| I've had several instances of Kdenlive corrupting my save
| file, making them unable to be recovered. So no, that's not
| always a solution.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I had avid and resolve doing the same... I guess we just
| die instead of working with a proper pipe or telling the
| tool to also save an XML for emergencies. You will have
| failures like that with every tool especially in editing
| and VFX.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Everything you're saying is right, but people hate hearing
| that an open source project is poorly made in a thread about
| it. Most of the people who get upset by what you're saying
| have probably never used it. It is very unstable and should
| not be relied on.
|
| Meanwhile resolve is fantastic and it's free.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| KDE stuff is prone to fixing bugs in both the supporting
| libraries and software substantially after the versions that
| end up in stable distros eg n.0 sucks but n.4 ends up
| substantially improving the prior issues.
|
| I would suggest a self contained version on stable distros or
| running on a rolling release whichever is practical.left to
| take advantage of said improvements.
|
| I would also suggest that performance under Windows may be
| less tested. I personally wouldn't use it there.
| justaregulanerd wrote:
| There's already a lot of replies to this comment so it
| clearly hit a nerve with a lot of people!
|
| All I'll add is that if this was 5 years ago, I'd completely
| agree with you as I've had my timeline completely screw up
| before, or other unusual behaviours that ended up causing a
| project reset. And I'm not the only one[1], I remember this
| video when it came out.
|
| But while I'm not a regular YouTuber or videomaker, I still
| use Kdenlive about once a month and anecdotally it hasn't
| done this in at least 4 years. However, having software that
| you spend so much time working with ruin a project is
| legitimately traumatising, so I understand your strong
| feelings.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9gbsDkzKK8
| blensor wrote:
| kdenlive to me is like gimp. I launch it everytime I want to do
| something quickly, without really thinking about what tool to
| use.
|
| With Davinci Resolve I have to intentionally plan on making a
| video to be willing to use it, because it's much heavier,
| doesn't support the audio in most of the source videos I am
| using, so I have to convert that first, and does a lot more
| than what I usually need.
| dbolgheroni wrote:
| > much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't
| have the overwhelming learning curve
|
| Kate/Kdevelop also feels the same way, but for editors. Just
| the right amount of features.
| xattt wrote:
| Minor quibble, but I loved the mechanic of FCP taking over a
| second screen as a full-res scrub monitor. It made the computer
| feel like an appliance.
|
| I think the Kdenlive option is to move the scrubbing monitor
| window to the second monitor.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Do you deal with log encoded video?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Good progress but kdenlive still cannot handle HDR videos
| f_r_d wrote:
| It is in the roadmap ;)
| annnoo wrote:
| Holy! When I moved over to Linux (2018ish) video and photo
| editing was still the thing, where I was still moving back to
| Windows or macOS But apparently I should really take another look
| at Kdenlive, looks like a lot of things have improved heavily,
| that it could hit the sweet spot between my love hate
| relationship with Resolve and the ease of use of Sony Vegas back
| in the day. Thanks for posting !
| vladde wrote:
| has someone here moved from DaVinci Resolve to Kdenlive? how was
| that experience?
|
| i just was a bit shocked to find out Resolve didn't support h.264
| on their free tier on Linux, and i don't want to re-encode all my
| footage to AV1
| dasyatidprime wrote:
| Is that due to patent issues? A lot of people running open
| source H.264 codecs1 on Linux just ignore the patents and
| assume they're under the radar, but I bet a high-profile
| commercial entity can't get away with that. Like as a point of
| comparison, I remember the Raspberry Pi selling add-on license
| keys for certain codecs at one point for a similar reason, but
| that probably doesn't look like such a good strategy for a
| video editor on a niche platform. Then there was the thing
| where Red Hat had some kind of licensing deal with Cisco...
|
| 1 I don't remember which implementations are subject to this or
| what the actual terms are.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe
| accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track
| BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of
| work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this
| with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on
| board.
| riidom wrote:
| It sounds like you have no crash or corruption problems in
| Premiere at all.
| f_r_d wrote:
| Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience
| it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project
| recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover
| your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously
| save.
| dirasieb wrote:
| just download davinci resolve for free
| Narishma wrote:
| > having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of
| work is not something I am able to afford
|
| Clearly you can, if you are currently using Premiere.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working
| with larger projects with many clips.
|
| I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude
| Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over
| all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it
| mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding
| onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying
| from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are
| almost certainly poorly factored.
|
| Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would
| also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with
| the diff.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| You can write a bug report for each problem and attach a patch
| with the corresponding hack. Best thing you can do short of
| providing clean fixes.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| Creating the PR, doing the explanation you just did, and
| closing it yourself might be a good option. Then at least your
| code lives somewhere that someone else can reuse if desired.
| Ideally combined with a linked issue that you do keep open.
| throw101010 wrote:
| I'd open a Draft PR and an Issue to explain the problems you
| encountered and how you've solved them for your own use
| cases... then leave it up to them to learn from it or close it.
|
| I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context
| or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project
| (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or
| its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.
| Rapzid wrote:
| This is a great comment. As someone who has been involved in
| managing a large (business backed) OSS project I can say that
| even if we preferred to have our own solutions to issues, we
| really valued comprehensive issues and draft PRs to
| reference.
|
| Sometimes you just don't have the time to get a PR to a
| projects mergeable standards, but the solution as a reference
| can have a ton of value for those that eventually get a PR
| across the finish line.
|
| I would say, though, that agentic coding seriously
| complicates the entire situation...
| mentos wrote:
| Id say ask AI to 'describe the problem and solution from a high
| level. avoid code excerpts if possible.' Submit as a bug report
| and mention you have an AI solution for reference if desired.
| deckar01 wrote:
| You should be running your own fork before making pull
| requests. You don't have to get other people to use it, you
| just need to get in the habit of rebasing regularly and cutting
| releases for yourself. Someday I hope maintainers get better
| visibility into downstream improvements without the politics of
| pull requests.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| My suggestion is to do a "human summary" of what you asked the
| agent and what it found, _maybe_ supply the code it generated,
| mayyybe.. but mostly recommend they not review it but instead,
| the reviewer give the PR to their own agent to do a
| reimplementation.
|
| Since code is cheap now, why not replace reviewing with
| reimplementing!
| throwaway2046 wrote:
| That's quite the impressive feature set. I do want to use
| Kdenlive but coming from Shotcut I didn't find the UI as easy to
| use, especially when it comes to handling the timeline... Maybe
| I'll try it again one day.
| nine_k wrote:
| Just spend 3-4 days of quality time with it, watch a few
| youtube tutorials when stuck, and things will fall into place.
|
| (Same story, shotcut - kdenlive.)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Projects like this is why making languages like C++ safer is also
| relevant, we're not rewriting the world.
|
| Kudos for keeping improving Kdelive.
| Daunk wrote:
| Every KDE app I try (and the Plasma desktop) seems so good on
| paper, and they promise me the world! Then, wen I actually try
| them out, they always end up crashing or doing something weird.
| Like I cannot stand GIMP, so I've tried using Krita, but I don't
| think I've ever managed to finish something in it before it
| crashes. It's the same with Kdenlive.
|
| Damn shame.
| simonask wrote:
| I don't use any KDE apps, but the Plasma desktop has been
| absolutely rock solid and super performant for me.
|
| I do think that the idea that each toolkit has its own native
| app for each thing you might want to do with a computer is a
| recipe for a forest of half-maintained nearly-good apps. A lot
| of the KDE and GNOME app suites feel like checking boxes.
| nine_k wrote:
| That's pretty weird; both Gimp and Krita (very different tools)
| were rock-solid to me. Speaking of KDEnlive, I experienced a
| few anomalies and crashes using the version from my distro; I
| switched to an AppImage version, and with it, everything Just
| Works(tm).
|
| I suspect your crashes may also be related to dependencies, not
| some deficiencies of the application itself. Try a different
| build / AppImage / Flatpak, and see if you encounter the same
| problems.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| Kdenlive is amazing. As someone that learned basic video editing
| through cracked versions of Premiere growing up, I love that a
| completely free tool can do everything I need for editing without
| the nonsense of basic editors or tools like Clipchamp that lock
| ffmpeg flags like 4k rendering behind paid gates. My only issue
| with the tool right now is crashing and corrupted backups which
| happened a few times on the video I edited a few weeks ago.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I can confirm that it got more stable for me in 2025. Good job!
| bttmchnd wrote:
| Related: Niccolo Venerandi (a KDE developer) criticizes Kdenlive
| and proposes a proof of concept of a QML-based node-based video
| editor using shaders to achieve full GPU acceleration for
| everything (Kdenlive doesn't use GPU/is unstable and hiccups)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlgrCqgnk-M
| nickjj wrote:
| I wish Kdenlive had 2 things:
|
| 1. A way to play back videos at 2x speed while editing in an
| intuitive way (DaVinci Resolve does this perfectly).
|
| TBH I'm not sure how this isn't a feature since it's straight up
| a 2x time saver for anyone editing a video since playing back a
| 10 minute at 2x is only 5 minutes of real life time.
|
| With Resolve I can actively edit / cut / etc. my videos at 2x
| speed playback but the exported video comes out as 1x. In other
| words, this isn't a request to adjust the clip speed, it's 100%
| limited to playback in the editor. Also audio playback is
| perfect, it sounds exactly like a YouTube video being played at
| 2x.
|
| With Kdenlive live you have to adjust the playback speed after
| every time you make a cut (stopping the video) which is very not
| user friendly and I don't know what algorithm they are using but
| the audio sounds really poor at 2x. It seems to skip every other
| frame of audio so it sounds like it's constantly dropping out and
| not smooth.
|
| 2. A revamped title creator so creating titles is as fast and
| easy as Camtasia.
| tester457 wrote:
| I wish Kdenlive had an api so that I could improve the QOL for
| myself.
| blt wrote:
| The title creator is bad... as a total amateur who needs to
| edit a video every now and then, it hurt me.
| mudkipdev wrote:
| If anyone has a better workflow for creating lots of captions
| in kdenlive please let me know. I had to duplicate each title
| to the media library and drag it into the timeline, because if
| I simply copy/pasted then the text content/styling would be
| shared across instances
| Rapzid wrote:
| A couple years ago I did some basic OBS recording of technical
| stuff and needed a simple, preferably OSS, editing and
| compositing solution polish up the vids.
|
| The landscape was bonkers. After trying lots of free, freemium,
| and paid trials I finally landed on Kdenlive. At the time I got
| the sense that it had just recently, within the past couple(max)
| years, gotten much better and much more usable than a lot of the
| internet had caught on to. I'd liken it to the Blender 2.5
| release. It was perfectly usable on my system for editing 4k
| video with my basic needs.
|
| Haven't used it over the past couple years but it's nice to see
| that they have been pushing it forward even harder. Even based on
| my 2-3 year old experience with it I'd encourage anyone looking
| for basic, but comprehensive, video editing needs to give it a
| go.
|
| Edit: I'm not saying it's limited to basic editing. I just mean
| that it's perfectly adequate and usable without being
| overwhelming and "unfriendly". Watch a Youtube Kdenlive 101 intro
| vid and you're good to go.
| accelbred wrote:
| Kdenlive is great. With zero video-editing experience, I was able
| to easily edit a demo video, cutting portions, clipping pauses,
| etc.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Other options for Mac/Win/Linux =3
|
| Davinci Resolve
|
| * CorridorKey plugin (cutting edge green/blue screen "AI"
| masking)
|
| * Blender EXR workflows
|
| * Paid (unless buying a really expensive camera)
|
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
|
| https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runti...
|
| Cinelerra GG
|
| * less popular, but had GPU cluster acceleration at one point
|
| * FOSS
|
| https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages
|
| Shotcut
|
| * simple to learn
|
| * compatible with most platforms, but slow
|
| * FOSS
|
| https://www.shotcut.org/download/
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