Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

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the title is incredibly misleading. pitivi has been around since 2004. i don't think any of the linux editors really got the traction they needed. this is more of an awareness campaign for their fundraiser.

not saying that's bad, i'm also wishing them all the luck in the world, and it's been a while since i followed the topic. but it's also worth noting that lightworks finally released its' linux beta last quarter.[1]

personally i'm not a big fan of either the audio infrastructure or gstreamer in linux. but i guess it will allow them more easily to support many video and audio formats, why not directly use a non free build of ffmpeg though is beyond me.

as a sidenote, the state of audio is not really that great in linux either, there is actually a way to use vst plugins in wine, but afair it depends on jack, and some proprietary steinberg library, which means that in linux tradition the average joe consumer doesn't have access to those things.

i think professional audio and video go hand in hand, but then again what do i know.

[1] http://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl...

>the state of audio is not really that great in linux either

I personally disagree, after doing hobbyist music production on Windows with Cubase (& friends) for years, I moved to Linux and I found a whole ecosystem well integrated into the OS/distro itself that makes me way more productive with better results.

While the array of finetuned technologies/plugins/samples might not be as extensive as on other more popular platforms, the Jack environment and its freedom is really unrivaled.

I think it has to do with the way of doing things on Linux systems vs other operating systems, while on Windows you have your DAW + ReWire, on Linux you just fire up Jack and a few dozens of smaller applications (+ your DAW, which might be Rosegarden or Ardour or others) that you can tie together with easy-to-use interfaces like patchage or ladish. On that note, ladish is awesome, allowing you to suspend and recover whole jack sessions (with dozens of programs) in a simple click.

Also check out kxstudio, they have some really fancy and nicely built tools that further improve the ecosystem.

What is your experience with Pulse Audio? I don't know much about Linux audio but my understanding is that various transitions between technologies were a source of many frustrations. What is running under Jack on your system?

Pulseaudio used to be kind of troublesome back in the day but nowadays it's been much much better. It works out of the box on all the distros I've tried (Arch, Manjaro, Debian and Ubuntu).

When I was running Debian (this was 2 years ago, by the way) I used to need to kill Pulseaudio before launching Jack because the two systems used to conflict and when Jack was running a lot of Pulseaudio applications wouldn't work (so, for example, if you had Jack running you couldn't watch a movie with audio through pulse). Nowadays I use Manjaro as desktop distro and I can just launch qjackctl (or resume a ladish session) without needing to manually stop pulse myself, it's all done automatically and it's really seamless. I use jack only when I'm doing sound production/recording, for everything else Pulseaudio is great.

All I know is that coming from the Windows world with Stereo Mix and the configurability/stability of recording/playback devices, I have been constantly frustrated with my experience in Ubuntu. There have been a few moments of surprisingly pleasant features, but most of it has been frustrations such as:

- Low volume levels, and all the means I have tried to amplify cause quality degradation - Random devices showing up on streaming sites depending on what version of flash I'm running - Complete inability to access certain devices, non-functionality of "monitors" or just confusion about how the hell they work

Back during the times I was trying to deal with this I had attempted to switch over to ALSA/OSS or whatever and it was not a pleasant experience. I recall not even being able to get back to the functionality I had with pulseaudio before, and found no improvement on the low volume levels that have been the primary source of my woes.

One of the main reasons I find myself rebooting back to Windows is so that I can be back in the audio environment. Windows has been perfected to give me ultimate control over all my audio devices, with RealTek's drivers allowing me to duplicate my audio over both my front and back output jacks, monitor my stereo mix on other playback devices, and play with the quality/levels as I please.

Yeah, looking at Pitivi's home page[1] (something that was magically missing from the linked-to article?!) makes it pretty clear that wasn't started yesterday.

I think it's interesting that it's written in Python, that's quite unexpected for such a "heavy-lifting" application. Of course, it's Python on top of the C GStreamer backend, but that sounds really nice.

[1] http://www.pitivi.org/

No it isn't, 100% of the heavy lifting is via gstreamer, which is all written in C. Python is a wonderful language, especially with gtk, for writing user interfaces. The real magic of pitivi is in gnonlin[1], the horribly named project which is a library for building video editors (essentially).

Disclaimer: www.pitivi.org + their wiki runs on my linux server and I help the project from time to time.

[1] http://gnonlin.sourceforge.net/

I've used Cinelerra quite a bit; it has multiple layers, color correction, and perspective filters, which makes me happy.

Cinelerra will be presented at NAB 2014. They say it is undergoing a redesign of some sort.

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