fedoraLife Concept (condensed version) online now

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Fri Jun 13 05:39:38 UTC 2008


On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> is kino in the main fedora repos?

Very very short story:
kino makes use of ffmpeg for some things so as things stand kino can't
really come in to Fedora. Pitivi is what we can ship as an editor. I
am not aware of anything else that makes use of gstreamer in the way
we need an application to do so we can ship it as a video editor.

Somewhat short story:
I've looked at kino a lot in the past few months, even before the
fedoratv concept was made public I was looking at the available video
editting toolset and took a real hard look at if kino could be
included in Fedora..even if it was a crippled kino to get around the
ffmpeg requirement. I don't think it would be worth doing... unless we
can ship a version of ffmpeg that had the forbidden capabilities
stripped out.

Long story:
Kino is an interesting case. The way it leverages ffmpeg is as a
helper and if we could include a less capable version of ffmpeg tools
and libraries..even if they were renamed.. we could ship a functional
kino in a way that additional functionality would be re-enabled as
soon as a more functional ffmpeg was made available on a client
system.  FFmpeg has a crap load of things it does well, beyond the
forbidden codec support and kino makes use of those abilities to
encode different quality of theora.  I found a way to replace ffmpeg
with gst to export theora, though with less video quality options like
interlacing.  It was enough as a start.
But Kino also makes use of ffmpeg to import source material that is
not raw dv.  I couldn't find a way to use gstreamer to do what kino
needed to import theora as source material.  If someone can figure
that part out, then we have the ability to ship a useful kino that can
mix theora and raw dv together as source material and then export
theora.

The problem is, I don't think we can easily ship a cutdown ffmpeg
without some major surgery. I don't think we can just set some compile
time flags produce binaries with the forbidden capabilities disabled.
I dont think all the capabilities that are problematic have compile
time switches.  And I'm not even sure that would suffice from a legal
standpoint. If we had to patch out the capabilities from the source we
distributed that would be even harder, I'm not sure all the
capabilities are delineated clearly.  In either case there would have
to be a comprehensive code review of ffmpeg by someone who understood
where the legal line was and had the ability to patch out the code.
The only person I can think of to do that, is spot. And I haven't
asked him to do it, because I think his finite time is better used on
other things.

Summary:
So right now.. pitivi is the best thing we have access to that we can
ship as a video editor to produce theora videos. It can mix theora and
raw dv as source material. And talking to J5 it seems that there is a
pitivi Google SoC project this summer so we might see a ramp up in its
stability and featureset. If I were going to burn whatever remaining
street cred I have in the Fedora community on getting an application
polished up.. it would be on pitivi.  I'm hoping that if we start
pumping out videos,even crappy videos, I'll be able to generate enough
interest in our userbase and I'll be able to find people in our
community with enough technical ability to engage pitivi upstream and
help them stablize pitivi and grow its plugin capability.  Because I
certainly can't do it. But I'll get on my soapbox and sing the praises
of the people who can and do.

-jef




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