JahShaka

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 5:01 AM, Casey Dahlin <cjdahlin at ncsu.edu> wrote:
>  Pitivi is nice for little home movies, but it is NOT an industrial strength
> NLE and I think it would do more harm to itself than good if it tried to be.
> It will keep Joe User very happy, but not the prosumer crowd. And trying to
> give Cinelerra to those people is just embarrassing. Its about as stable as
> win98 and kludgey as hell.

If wishes were fishes.  Right now.. pitivi what we can ship.  And I
plan to beat the drum quite loudly about its potential as a piece of
technology that this project can make use of to produce video by and
for this community. Regardless of the quality of its featureset, it is
what we have.  I'm tired of holding my breath waiting for something
else to come along that isn't mired the codec problem.

If pitivi never "grows up" so what.... nothing says that its interface
can't be forked and features can't be added over what is fundamentally
the only framework we can ship.

I've known about JahShaka for over a year now, If you can get them to
dig in and switch to a gstreamer framework that does NOT directly
depend on gstreamer-ffmpeg for most if not all of its magic.. more
power to you.

It's not just about switching to gstreamer. You can end up with an
application that uses gstreamer but still relies on gstreamer-ffmpeg
or other forbidden gstreamer plugins for all the useful features and
STILL not have an application that we can ship.  The real problem is
that ffmpeg conglomerates a lot of useful things together, beyond just
the codec stuff that we can't touch.  So you reach for ffmpeg through
gstreamer for deinterlace support or best effort raw dv footage
handling and you are back to where you started.  It's much more
complicated than just moving to gstreamer.

I think it's going to be much easier to start from an ffmpeg clean
implementation of a video editor like pitivi and build on it, even if
it ends up being a fork. Because everything else that I have seen
ultimately relies on ffmpeg for important functionality and that
simply has to stop or we can't ship it.

-jef