[Kdenlive-devel] piave: AVI DV support

[Rolf Dubitzky]

Hi guys,

one thing that was long due is the native AVI DV support. Most wondoze 
programs can write "DV format", where the actual DV frames are inside of an 
AVI container (with or without an extra audio track). dvgrab also writes this 
sort of file. As far as I can tell this has no advantage over raw DV files, 
but at this point I do all my capturing on windoze, since kino capturing is 
constantly crashing on me and with just using dvgrab I cannot see what I am 
actually capturing. So I want to be able to read my AVI DV files created on 
windows. This is done and works very nicely. It is committed to the 
V00-03-devel branch.

If anyone is testing this, I would like to hear if it's working.

In principle, since I had to write a almost complete AVI parser, it is now 
possible to add native piave codecs for audio/video inside AVI for piave 
(e.g. with libavcoded of ffmpeg).

Also I did some further work on enix integration (which would provide it's own 
container parsers for AVI and MPEG etc.), and to tell you the truth, I think 
I was right from the beginning. Editing a video sequence in compresses divx 
files is completely stupid. I think even mpeg might be a problem. It's just 
not possible to do fast searches and move backwards in a file. Right now, 
everything is so slow, it's by _far_ unusable.
If anything else, it will at least take a lot of work to optimise intelligent 
caching of mpeg-chunks inbetween I frames. There is just no single video 
library for linux which does that. They are all coded with fast replay in 
mind, but not for editing, there it's necessary to cache the decoded frames.

If DV wouldn't be limited to PAL or NTSC resolution, I would strongly vote for 
just converting averything you want to edit to DV and then edit it in DV. Who 
cares about disk space these days.

I think I would rather like to start coding some functionality for capturing. 
Since I would like to play around with Qt anyway, I can also implement a 
little dialog in kdenlive.

Cheers,
Rolf

***************************************************************
 Rolf Dubitzky          http://hep.phy.tu-dresden.de/~dubitzky
 e-mail:         Rolf.Dubitzky at Physik dot TU-Dresden dot de
***************************************************************