Nat and video conversion

Nat has iTunes on her box. She is converting several movies to fit on her iPod. It shoots them down as much as possible to fit. The software seems to do a pretty good job. We upped the RAM on her box from one to three gigs a while back. Even with this, it says it will take a day or so for it to happen. She gets invalid frames from the home made videos that worry her. I hope it will just skip the bad ones and move along.

She has Windows Vista on that box and the normal complement of software. Every program including Windows wants to update itself and restart the machine in the process. This is not a good thing when converting movies that take days. She has learned to sever the machine from the internet while this effort runs. Video conversion is still one of the most stressful things you can do on a box. Well, maybe not. It does make for tons of math.

When I get the new video camera I will not be able to use the software that it comes with. That is Windows and Mac only. I have been sifting through the Linux universe for the correct software to use for editing and converting to something useful. I've all but come up blank. I am just going to wait until it comes in and play with it. There are a bunch of programs for editing video on Linux, but they all suck.

Cinelerra is a full fledged video editing software. It is just too bad it never runs or only half it's features work for five consecutive minutes when in use. It is so bad that it doesn't really even exist right now.The people who wrote it are trying to rewrite what they have and that looks so bad that a bunch of new people are trying to write the same thing, but different because they don't trust the old people to do any better job this time round. I'm so proud to be a Linux user at this moment.

Kino only does chopping that I can tell and only works in DV files. You have to import any other format and then export as the format you want when you are done. the intermediate files are enormous and useless. It is a pain.

avidemux is a very simple tool again just for chopping and stitching. I think it does text too. Not sure. I'll have plenty of time to play with it if it even remotely works on the video I get off the new video camera.

Then come Wine. That is, running the video editing software that works in Windows under Linux using Wine. Did I mention that I've never gotten any complex software to work under Wine. Not completely. Not with all features. Not without modifying Wine. Not without spending hours and every Linux trick in the book to get that user friendly dribble crap junk software to work. Then it stops working the next time Wine updates.

VMWare might work. If I had a licensed copy of Windows, I might get it to work under VMWare. To be honest, this is the most likely thing to work. That is, if I had an extra $99 or whatever the cheapest version of Windows is going for these days to blow. The camera is only $209 last time I checked.