Archive for the 'news' Category

Open letter to MainConcept at Mad Penguin

Friday, August 24th, 2007

Matt Hartley at Mad Penguin writes:

This is an open letter to the creators of MainActor. MainConcept, I fully understand your need to better focus your efforts on your encoder business. But correct me if I ‘m wrong, is MainActor not the perfect vehicle for moving the MPEG encoder?

I would agree that supporting the application, MainActor, is likely more than you wish to support right now. But instead of writing it off, why not simply open source the code for this application, including its existing Deb and RPM packages, while using it to sell your Encoder products? Here, let me break this down for you.

MainActor + A Liberal Open Source License = Easy Distribution for Your Core Business Model.

Read the full story here.

An important consideration for MainConcept that I think Mr. Hartley overlooks is the amount of work it will take on their part to ensure that any source code they release does not include proprietary technology. What if they accidentally include code they wished to keep proprietary? Auditing the code would take some work. Further, MainActor was created by a team of people who in all likelihood feel a sense of pride in their work. Like giving away the family dog because little Billy’s allergic, they are not going to just hand it over to anyone. They’ll want to find a good home. What are the guarantees that if they do release the code, it won’t just languish with no developers attending to it? At least if they keep it, they can retain control.

Second Public Talk

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

After a good run at the August mini-meeting of the Triangle Linux User’s Group (TriLUG), I will be doing another talk on video production with Linux tools for their regular monthly meeting on September 13th, 7:00 PM at RedHat’s headquarters on the scenic Centennial Campus in Raleigh.

The talk will be an expansion and refinement of the previous iteration. I’ll cover the basic linux tools available and describe their capabilities and usage. The most notable improvements will be to the Kino tutorial. This time we’ll see video capture, creating sequences of images and video clips, adding titles, and exporting for DVD and the web.

Petition to release MainActor Source Code

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

MainActor, a commercial product for video editing on a Linux platform, has been discontinued. This means that the source code could potentially be made open-source. A petition is circulating to encourage MainConcept to consider releasing at least some of their code. The author of the petition writes about it on his blog. In addition to signing the petition, you can lend a hand by digging it.

A similar initiative was started by the Blender Foundation many years ago, and they successfully bought the source code for something like a hundred thousand euros, and then released it as open source.

MainActor has always been a well reviewed product, although the price tag was generally too much for many people. A source code release from MainConcept would come in the form of a partial code base, with their proprietary encoding technology removed. An effort would need to be made to replace those parts with something like libavcodec. If Blender is a good model, the process will be slow, but the potential for an active community is vast. Today Blender has one of the largest, most enthusiastic, and fastest growing user communities out there.

Linux.com editorial on Linux Video

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

Once or twice a year I look at FOSS video editing tools to see if they’re ready for everyday use by advanced amateur and low-end professional video makers, which is where I classify myself in the video production hierarchy. There have been several notable improvements recently that have moved FOSS video editing tools a little closer to practicality, but FOSS desktop video editing still has a long way to go before it can be taken seriously by people who need to turn out high-quality video productions on tight deadlines.

The above is from “Open source video editing still has a long way to go”, a feature article by Roblimo over at Linux.com.

Public Talk

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

On August 15, 2007, at 6:00 PM, I’ll be giving a talk on video production in a Linux environment for the Carolina Open Source Initiative and the Triangle Linux Users Group. The talk will be in 208 Manning Hall on UNC campus. The majority of the talk will be in the form of a Kino tutorial, although I plan to give an overview of the other major tools.

Off Site Review, Linux Audio Software

Monday, February 12th, 2007

In this blog post at the Linux Journal, Dave Phillips writes about Linux audio software. He profiles:

  1. The Dynebolic, MusiX, and JAD (Jack Audio Distribution) live CD distributions.
  2. Amarok, a music player with many iTunes-like functions.
  3. The bang Book, documentation of Pd (Pure data), which is a free realtime audio signal processing application like Max/MSP.
  4. Various Csound softwares that extend Csound, a high quality audio synthesis and sequencing programming language.
  5. Rosegarden, a midi sequencer and audio mixing package.
  6. ZynAddSubFX, the most popular software sythenizer available for Linux.

New Multimedia Distribution - Ubuntu Studio

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

On boingboing yesterday it was noted that there will shortly be a new flavor of Linux distribution focused on providing support for multimedia creators. Ubuntu Studio, scheduled to be available in April 2007, will include Cinelerra-CV (the community version). This means that Cinelerra-CV will soon be available as packaged software for Ubuntu, making it accessible to a much broader set of users.