Dobrica Pavlinušić's Weblog / Blog

As I have complained several times before, I have problems with my ATI Technologies Inc M52 [ATI Mobility Radeon X1300] card on IBM/Lenovo T60 (don't you just love those company name changes?!)

I have been tracking two git repositories for drivers:

• git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/avivo/xf86-video-avivo
  Older reverse engineering effort to which I contributed PCI ID of my card
• git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd
  Newer effort based on AMD specification which developers from Novell received ahead of rest of Open Source community

Last time I reviewed the problem, both of those drivers where broken for my box.

This time, I must report that avivo driver is now finding my card, and in fact, I'm typing this blog post using it :-)

Even xrandr is reporting something which seems sane:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1400 x 1050, maximum 1400 x 1400
VGA unknown connection 1280x800+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1280x800       60.0* 
   1280x768       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        59.9  
LFP connected 1400x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 305mm x 228mm
   1400x1050      60.0*+   50.0  
   1280x1024      59.9  
   1280x800       60.0  
   1280x768       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        60.0     59.9  

I will have to plug in external monitor to test this out! /me happy

OOH, radeon-hd is showing just blank screen. So, don't give up upon avido driver yet!

The most useful hint for testing drivers from git is to simply do:

ln -sf /usr/lib/xorg/ /usr/local/lib/xorg

because both of those drivers have tendency to install into /usr/local by default (which is good), but then Debian installed Xorg won't find it. I could have done ./configure --prefix=/usr, but autogen.sh in git repository doesn't have that, and who wants to thing about small things all the time?!

I wanted to edit some video for my local LUG. However, this doesn't seem to be simple task under Linux.

I have some background since I worked on local TV station from 1991-1995 among other things in video editing. So I do know semi-professional and professional video equipment from those days (hack, I was earning good buck with it!) and my judgment is somewhat biased towards ease of use and practical problems which I encountered during editing of professionally shot video material (I don't nearly have so steady hand, it seems).

I have video materials recorded with JVC Everio GZ-MG575E (There doesn't seem to be any good official JVC page about it. Go figure that!) Reposted by lsusb as:

Bus 005 Device 004: ID 04f1:0008 Victor Company of Japan, Ltd GZ-MG30AA/MC500E Digital Video Camera

Files from internal read-only vfat 40Gb disk are available when camera is mounted as USB device on Linux as sd_video/prg001/mov*.mod. File on one of files report MPEG sequence, v2, program multiplex.

Let's look at available options:

1. Kino - Safe choice, right? Debian package, version 1.1.1.
   It can't import avi in original format. When I tried to convert it some other .avi format using ffmpeg it segfaulted on loading of that avi.
   It has somewhat home video look which I don't like.
2. cinelera - GUI hurtes my eyes and distracts too much from video footage. I tried. I really tried. It didn't work for me.
3. The Open Movie Editor can't be compiled from upstream repository. Looked somewhat promising up to that point...
4. Avidemux - to be honest, I found this one while Googling for video editing on FreeBSD software section video. Good catch, I had Debian package version 2.3.0 available from www.debian-multimedia.org.
   Very nice tool, it fits my brain rather well. Well, I would have to remap keys because it's just half-usable on notebook keyboard (no numeric keymap, allthough I might buy USB one just for this application :-)
5. pitivi able to import avi, but blocked after a few clicks and stopped refreshing screen. It's interesting to note that clips which where loaded into avidemux had little picture from movie, while the ones which weren't loaded didn't.
6. LiVES - last time I tried to find video editing software, LiVES turned out as only software which worked at all. Still, strange intraface, in part Gtk based, and in part just ugly doesn't sit well with me.
7. Kdenlive is another project which is well worth a look. Clean QT interface, all the options I would like, want or need.
   Just two problems: I don't hear any audio. I do get blink sound from KDE, but not from video sound. Another problem is related to by attempts to solve previous one: upstream Subversion repository source code doesn't pass configure on my machine. Yikes.
   Update: My problems with audio are solved after I insalled sdl-alsa variant (instead of old alsa-oss, my fault). It's quite capable software, my only remaining gripe is that every action has a click or two indirection until you can have it done. Other than that I have problems with audio-video sync when producing any format other than mpeg (which is same as my source format), but I don't care much about that, because I intend to do recoding as final step into multiple formats anyway...