Boston Linux Meeting Wednesday, March 17, 2004 (room 4-370):Movie Production with Linux & Cinelerra

[Joshua Flythe]

I installed Mplayer from source last year and it was a PITA. I have since 
found unofficial Debian packages for Mplayer which are available from 

http://marillat.free.fr/

It has been a while since I have used mplayer, but I seem to remember it 
working ok for my needs.

>On Tuesday 09 March 2004 22:49, Derek Martin scribbled:
> On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 09:45:55PM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> > When: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 7:00 PM (6:30 for general Q&A)
> > Topic: LinuxSoup VII:Movie Production with Linux & Cinelerra
> > Location:  MIT Building 4-370
> > Presented by: Christoph Doerbeck
>
> This is an interesting topic.  I wish I could come.  Since I can't, I
> have a few questions which might serve as an introduction to the
> meeting...
>
> I tried to use Cinelerra on Red Hat 9 a few months ago, and IIRC I
> found that it would crash extremely easily.  What distribution(s) do
> you run it on, and how reliable do you find it?
>
> When producing my own videos, I've found that the only CODEC supported
> by Adobe Premiere or Windows Movie Maker which produces good quality
> at reasonable file sizes is Windows Media 9.  Unfortunately, this
> pretty much means that the resulting movie can't be played on Linux...
> So two related questions to this one:
>
> 1. What CODECs does Cinelerra support, and how is the quality vs.
>    file size tradeoff?
>
> 2. Does anyone know what CODECs/settings to use in Premiere to produce
>    reasonably sized movies with good quality, which can also be played
>    on Linux?  The best I've been able to manage is MPEG II at about
>    24MB/m.  Even at that size, there are noticable artifacts in both
>    the MPEG video and JPEG stills.  They're not bad, but they're
>    noticable.  AFAIAC, stills should be perfect quality (as good as
>    the original JPEG image)...
>
> FWIW, I use VideoLan Client for playback.  It plays most MPEG movies
> without problems, and I've even managed to play some quicktime and WMV
> files with it.  But only some of the CODECs are supported...
>
> If people know that there are other players with better CODEC support,
> I'll certainly be interested to look at them.  I keep meaning to check
> out mplayer...  But I had heard that mplayer was difficult to install.
> Is that (still) true?