Adobe 64-bit Flash plugin..and it works!

At the end of November, Adobe released a 64-bit Flash plugin:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

And, shocker of shockers, it actually works!

To Install Flash Plugin on x86-64
You'll download the tarball from here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html


The only thing in the tarball is libflashplayer.so. To install the 64-bit Flash plugin, simply move libflashplayer.so into your user's .mozilla/plugins directory and restart Firefox.

Here's a more full set of instructions:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes_64bit.html#install

Even more amazing, the bloody thing works on my Fedora 10, x86-64 virtual machine running in VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro! Yee haw! This will definetly help me as I'm preparing a presentation on Cinelerra for the Trenton Computer Festival in April.

Much thanks to the Adobe Linux team!
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/11/now_supporting_16_exabytes.html

the mule

Why Cinelerra?

I received a question from a person unfamiliar with Cinelerra and I thought that my response should be shared. The person has a friend who runs Cinelerra in Ubuntu and he wanted a more experienced users' perspective on how Cinelerra compares to the more established, commercial packages like Premiere or Vegas. Here is how I responded to him.

Cinelerra is very powerful software if you can overcome some of its idiosyncracies. Idiosyncracies like:
1) it is difficult to install for most people
2) it sometimes crashes. There are more crashes on 32-bit systems. However, the consequences of a crash aren't bad, as you can simply restart Cinelerra, load the automatically generated backup file and pick up where you left off.
3) rendering to final formats is challenging

Cinelerra is buggy in a consistent way. In other words, if you have the time and energy to figure out what works and what doesn't work, then you can base a workflow around that. But that effort is a huge time sink.

It doesn't get any better when you upgrade your system, because what once
worked in a previous distro will break in your new distro. So, you spend
oodles of time figuring out how to fix it.

It takes a certain kind of person who relishes the constant challenges of Cinelerra and Linux to power through these difficulties. Cinelerra is not everyone's cup of tea for sure, but you can get usable content out of Cinelerra if you know what works and what doesn't. Otherwise, save your valuable time and effort, buy a dual quad core Mac or PC with Final Cut Pro or Avid or Premiere or Vegas and be happy that everything works out of the box. Which isn't always the case even with those softwares.

Because Cinelerra is free software, it will never be as well supported as those commercial products. That being said, I have Cinelerra installed on Fedora 10 x86, 64-bit and the only time it has crashed is when I've done something stupid like try to write to a filesystem that is full or trigger a known bug, like using the broken DV import-record function.

I have spent the last two years learning the software and documenting specific processes using Cinelerra. You might glean some useful information by subscribing to my blog's RSS feed, because it documents the challenges I face in getting the software to work properly:
http://crazedmuleproductions.blogspot.com/

I would suggest that a 64-bit machine is most stable for Cinelerra, moreso than a 32-bit machine. That is due to the fact that the 64-bit build will take full advantage of the memory resources on your computer and video editing is very taxing on a computers memory.

From the conversations on http://cvs.cinelerra.org/, the largest installed base of users seems to be on Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian distros. I would suggest starting with one of those distros, as many people on the CVS will be able to help you if you encounter problems.

There are two versions of Cinelerra. The original version you can get from http://www.heroinewarrior.com/, but the author does not support the software. The most actively supported version of the software is the Community Version (CV) and can be found on http://cvs.cinelerra.org/. That community of which I am part, has done significant work to fix bugs, accumulate and pass on knowledge to people interested in this great, free software and video editing in general.

The RPMFusion repository is the one main Fedora repository has Cinelerra RPMs for most recent Fedora versions:
rpmfusion.org
Information on installing Cinelerra for all other distributions can be found here:
http://cvs.cinelerra.org/getting_cinelerra.php

Here is a list of related articles regarding first-time installations on Fedora:
Getting Started with Cinelerra
Building Cinelerra on 64-bit Fedora 9 from Source
Beginner's Guide to Exporting Video from Cinelerra
Exports and Linux Player Compatibility Chart from the article Render Compatibility on Fedora 10, x86-64
Cinelerra for Grandma

Finally, if you don't want to fuss with your own install, you may download one of two VMware virtual machines that I have created specifically for video editing with Cinelerra and all the tools you need to get started:
Fedora Core 6, 32-bit VMware virtual machine ~1GB
Fedora 10, x86-64 VMware virtual machine ~3GB

The Mule

getting started with Cinelerra

A couple of friends asked me about how to get started with Cinelerra. Here are a few techniques that have helped me:

Download and install the CV version of Cinelerra
As it is actively updated, the community version of Cinelerra is a good starting point:
http://cvs.cinelerra.org/getting_cinelerra.php

Run Cinelerra from a Terminal
Once you install it, run Cinelerra in a terminal, so you can see the error output. It will look like this:
[mule@ogre ~]# cinelerra
Cinelerra 2.1CV (C) 2006 Heroine Virtual Ltd.
Compiled on Mon Oct 8 23:47:21 EDT 2007

Cinelerra is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License,
and you are welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under
certain conditions. There is absolutely no warranty for Cinelerra.
Render::run 1
Render::run 2
Render::run 3
Render::run 4
Render::run 5
Render::run 6
Render::run 7
Render::run 8
Render::run 8.1
Render::run 8.2
Render::run 8.3
Render::run 9
Render::run 10
x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities MMX MMXEXT SSE SSE2
x264 [info]: slice I:71 Avg QP: 2.00 size:199495 PSNR Mean Y:64.88 U:65.58 V:65.60 Avg:65.10 Global:65.06
x264 [info]: slice P:17600 Avg QP: 5.00 size: 3153 PSNR Mean Y:62.18 U:62.58 V:62.57 Avg:62.30 Global:62.12
x264 [info]: mb I I16..4: 41.8% 0.0% 58.2%
x264 [info]: mb P I16..4: 1.0% 0.0% 0.2% P16..4: 9.6% 0.2% 0.1% 0.0% 0.0% skip:89.0%
x264 [info]: SSIM Mean Y:0.9999576
x264 [info]: PSNR Mean Y:62.192 U:62.595 V:62.579 Avg:62.308 Global:62.131 kb/s:945.04

Read the Doc!
The most important step! As Cinelerra is a very powerful program, its functionality is very deep. Therefore, there is a lot to know about it. Read the documentation! If you don't read documentation, this program is not for you.
http://cvs.cinelerra.org/docs.php

A very nice beginner's guide written by Raffaella Traniello:
Cinelerra for Grandma

If Cinelerra Crashes
1) restart and select File -> Load from Backup
- This allows you to start where you left off
2) Check the buglist:
http://bugs.cinelerra.org/

Try Alternatives
If something doesn't work in the expected fashion:
1) Read the documentation (as above)
2) Try alternatives
For instance, if a file does not import in Cinelerra, convert it to a format that will! You can use ffmpeg to convert from any format to almost any format. Here is a sample ffmpeg command line to do this:
ffmpeg -i inputFile.containerFormat outputFile.containerFormat

For example
ffmpeg -i inputDvd.mpg outputQuicktime.mov

FFMPEG References
Nice howto: http://howto-pages.org/ffmpeg/
FFMPEG documentation: http://http//ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/documentation.php

Don't forget to read my Beginner's Guide to Exporting Video from Cinelerra!
/2007/06/beginners-guide-to-exporting-video-from.html

I hope this helps,
the mule

building Cinelerra on FC6 64-bit

Update 10/26/2007:
These instructions work well for F7 (Fedora 7), 64-bit, too!

Update 10/29/2008:
These instructions still kick ass..a year later when I blew up my system!

Update 11/20/2008:
I've rebuilt my Fedora 7 system as Fedora 9. The Cinelerra build instructions are different than the Fedora 7 instructions in that they use ATrpms repository. But all-in-all, the install went well!

I just purchased a Dell SC1430 dual Xeon, quad-core server to replace my aging Dell SC400 tower. I will give a full review of that server in a later post. More immediately however, I thought I'd give the 64-bit Fedora Core 6 installation a whirl, as these Xeons support 64-bit. I figured that Cinelerra should fly with 64-bit install! Also, to ease my pain, I figured I'd stay with FC6, as I'm well familiar with this distribution. Eventually, I'll build out a 64-bit Debian Lenny distro to see how that performs (thanks for the suggestion, Graham)!

Here's How Things Went
The Fedora install is the same installer you get with the 32-bit version and went very smoothly.

I then proceeded to install the dependencies for building Cinelerra from source. In a nutshell, the yum installation was very similar to my 32-bit FC6 install which I described here, with some minor differences:
/2007/03/fedora-core-6-cinelerra-dependencies.html

The quick steps are:
1) have the proper yum repositories online (all Fedora, Livna and Dries)
2) make sure you have your GPG-KEYs loaded from Livna and Dries
3) remove the dries repositories (with the --disablerepo=dries switch shown) and install using the script below with only Fedora and Livna online:
4) remove the Livna repositories, enable FreshRPMs and install mjpegtools using the command:
yum --disablerepo=livna install mjpegtools*
5) get Cinelerra source code (refer to previous post on those details)
6) build from source (refer to previous post on those details)
7) install your favorite multimedia applications

The only differences between the 32-bit install and the 64-bit install that I noticed were that I had to specify the install of fftw specifically on 64-bit:
1) fftw (instead of fftw3)
2) fftw-devel

I've amended the script below to reflect those differences. Another interesting note is that with FC6 and above, no SMP-specific kernel is necessary. This is good! Finally, I installed my favorite multimedia apps:
yum install avidemux mencoder mplayer transcode vlc* xmms

However, to avoid this error, you should install xine separately without Livna repos online:
yum --disablerepo=livna install xine

I haven't gotten to really test out Cinelerra's capabilities on 64-bit, but I did render out a 40 minute Cinelerra project with full 720P HDV in a little over an hour. I rendered using QT container, MPEG-4 video compression with a constant bit rate of 10,000,000 and twos complement audio. This *almost* achieves what Heroine Warrior states about being able to achieve real-time rendering with HDV. Obviously, I believe some performance tweaks are in order and will need to work through these issues.

Here is that yum script which should get you going on 64-bit Fedora Core 6:

The Cinelerra FC6 64-bit Source Dependencies Install Script
yum install --disablerepo=dries \
libquicktime \
ffmpeg \
gsm-devel \
xvidcore* \
lame \
lame-devel \
libvorbis* \
libogg* \
libtool* \
a52* \
libtheora* \
libpng* \
libjpeg* \
libtiff* \
esound* \
audiofile* \
libraw1394* \
libavc1394* \
freetype* \
fontconfig* \
nasm \
e2fsprogs* \
faad2-dev* \
OpenEXR* \
fftw \
fftw-devel \
libsndfile* \
libiec61883* \
x264 \
x264-d* \
faac* \
libdv*

Don't forget to chmod a+x the file!

cheers,
the mule

Fedora Core 6 on x86 Cinelerra dependencies

I'm preparing to upgrade my Fedora Core 4 system to Fedora Core 6 and have figured out how to install the source dependencies for Cinelerra in Core 6 relatively painlessly in an instance of a VMware virtual machine.

I use yum to install the dependent packages.

I needed to do the installation in a number of separate steps, due to some repository conflicts for ffmpeg-devel sources between the fedora base and livna repos, as well as some trickiness with mjpegtools.

Here are the steps:
1) make sure you have the correct repositories in yum.
2) install the dependencies using the shell script below
- this script includes everything except mjpegtools
3) remove the livna repositories from yum and install mjpegtools (ffmpeg-devel, optional)
4) get the source code
5) compile Cinelerra from source

Step 1: Make sure yum repositories are available
In order to install Cinelerra from source, you will need to have the following repositories in yum:
1) fedora core, extras and updates
2) dries
3) livna

3/31/07 Note: do NOT have the freshrpms repository listed in yum when you do the install.

The Cinelerra CVS source code will not compile against the ffmpeg in Freshrpms. Reference: https://init.linpro.no/pipermail/skolelinux.no/cinelerra/2007-March/010361.html

Here's a nice rpm that installs the livna repositories into yum for you: rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

And don't forget the RPM key imports for each repository, such as the dries key: rpm -ivh http://dries.ulyssis.org/rpm/RPM-GPG-KEY.dries.txt

Step 2: Install dependent files
Here is the list of dependencies needed, already in the form of a shell script ready for you to cut-and-paste into your favorite text editor:
yum install \
libquicktime \
gsm-devel \
xvidcore* \
lame \
lame-devel \
libvorbis* \
libogg* \
libtool* \
a52* \
libtheora* \
libpng* \
libjpeg* \
libtiff* \
esound* \
audiofile* \
libraw1394* \
libavc1394* \
freetype* \
fontconfig* \
nasm \
e2fsprogs* \
faad2-dev* \
OpenEXR* \
fftw3* \
libsndfile* \
libiec61883* \
x264 \
x264-d* \
faac* \
libdv*

Don't forget to chmod a+x the file!

Steps 3: Install mjpegtools
Remove the livna repositories from yum and install ffmpeg-devel and mjpegtools:
4/3/07 addition (thanks Roland!)
yum --disablerepo=livna install mjpegtools*

If you wish, you may install ffmpeg-devel. But it is not essential for Cinelerra compilation.

Step 4: Get Cinelerra source code
Getting the source files assumes that you have subversion installed:
yum install subversion

Then checkout the Cinelerra CVS trunk:
svn checkout svn://svn.skolelinux.org/cinelerra/trunk/hvirtual

Step 5: Build from source
Build the source from the hvirtual directory:
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install

Here are some scripts that show the different portions of the installation process. You'll see the ffmpeg-libs and -devel conflicts at the bottom of script 1. In script 2, I've removed ffmpeg-devel from the initial install. Script 3 shows the successful install of ffmpeg-devel from the dries and fedora extras repositories. Script 4 shows the successful install of mjpegtools. Script 5/6 show the configure and make/make install processes.

typescript.1
typescript.2no_ffmpeg
typescript.3ffmpeg-devel
typescript.4mjpeg
typescript.5configure
typescript.6makeinstall

enjoy!

ALERT!
ALERT!
Just in case you follow these steps and get the dreaded x264 compile error: 'struct ' has no member named 'b_cbr' error, here are the steps to fix it:
http://crazedmuleproductions.blogspot.com/2007/06/dreaded-compilation-error-x264c139.html