Installed Software: Gentoo media-video category

• Video track must have "play" and "render" enabled.
• Other video track must not occlude.
• Set Preferences > Video Out > Video Driver to X11

Problem: Cinelerra dies when loading an AVI file, maybe not always.
Solution: libdv-0.102, 0.104, and 0.104-1 are the trouble. Solution is to get the latest from cvs (as of May-03-2006) to replace the Gentoo package. See Gentoo bug 121871.

Problem: Cinelerra introduces noise when exporting to RAW DV format. For status, see Cinelerra bug 293. Update: bug has been fixed in CVS.

Problem: Rendering audio to MPEG Audio, Level II, 384 Kbits produces a file both mplayer and mplex treat as short and silent.
Solution: Render with AC3 instead.

Problem: Rendered output is darker than what Cinelerra displays. Looks OK when viewed with Cinelerra, but not with another player.
Solution: Is your XVideo gamma calibrated? See Color, XVideo.

cinelerra-cvs latest:

Download via svn From: cvs.cinelerra.org

For Pentium 4, build with (see README.BUILD):

ALSA dependencies:

Compiling with the wrong ALSA headers can make cinelerra crash at odd times (e.g. when not playing sound). Whenever ALSA is upgraded, follow the procedure to upgrade all ALSA dependencies.

OpenGL: Cinelerra includes OpenGL 2.0 support for faster video display if available at build time. Run glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version" to see your OpenGL version. My old ATI Radeon 7000 doesn't support it. Current status is that you need a proprietary driver because Mesa doesn't yet support OpenGL 2.0. According to nVidia, "support for OpenGL 2.0 begins with the Release 75 series of drivers. GeForce FX (NV3x), GeForce 6 Series (NV4x), NV3xGL-based Quadro FX and NV4xGL-basedQuadro FX GPUs, and all future NVIDIA GPUs support OpenGL 2.0." Don't know about ATI.

Still doesn't work?

• Try make uninstall to clean things out and try again.
• Look for older libraries in /usr/local/lib/cinelerra

cinelerra-cvs-20060219 (2.0):
Gentoo has an ebuild for this. It requires some masked packages, but compiles and works! Stable, too! (As good or better than previous snapshots, anyway.)

cinelerra-cvs 20040917 (version 1.2.1):

Crashes soon after loading any media. Valgrind shows many, many problems.

cinelerra 1.1.7:

Specific CFLAGS are required to properly build cinelerra, and the 1.1.7 ebuild does not enforce them. Before emerging cinelerra 1.1.7, alter your "/etc/make.conf" so that CLAGS="-O2". Other values will either fail to build, or will cause some portions of cinelerra to either not work correctly or crash.

Gentoo is phasing out support for cinelerra builds. Too difficult to maintain. Replacing is cinelerra-cvs, maintained by cvs.cinelerra.org.

My original system (933 Mhz P-III with IDE drives) was too slow for this software. For example, I had video drop-outs while playing an unaltered movie in the compositor while tracking in the navigator window. Playing multiple or masked tracks was out of the question. Playback hungs while stepping forward by single frames.

I upgraded my hardware (2.6Ghz P-4, same drives). Cinelerra always hungs after play-then-stop, and I would have to kill it. I found solution in a bug on their Sourceforge site: run

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 cinelerra

(Prefixing an executable with environment variable assignments is a bash shell feature.)

• Prior problems with jpeg2yuv during DVD creation were mostly due to a misbehavior jpeg-mmx package. Package now removed from Gentoo: details here. Also see mjpegtools.
• J-PEG image dimensions must be evenly divisable by 16.
• Does not render PNG.
• Fails to render PNG images.

• ebuilds are available here for dvdstyler and wxSVG. Also see Custom/modified ebuilds.
• GUI and help are minimal. To make a slideshow, select several image files and drag the set to the timeline panel. No way to specify transition between images, change image ordering, or change image set.
• To create a slide show, best results with:
• Create slide show with Cinelerra.
• Render for DVD (see DVD Production Flow).
• Set the "post command" to "title 1" to loop forever.
• Preview before burning.

• Limited to one movie file per title. Chapter markers must be inserted by hand.
• Input is supposed to be MPEG, but it's not clear what exactly this means.
• Tried with .mpa and .m2v elemental streams, and it choked mplex with "frame data underruns detected". Run mplex manually and use output for dvdauthor.
  
• Decent documentation.
• During burn process, opens xine to show a preview of the DVD, and then asks whether to continue or abort. Nice touch!
• Not able to show inset images or inset movies.
• Not able to control DVD state machine in any way other than menu navigation.

mjpegtools provides the jpeg-mmx library, but this library has fallen into disrepair and no longer works reliably. For details, see MJPEG Tools.

mplex error: Too many frame drops - exiting
Explanation: This happens when the combined bitrate from the streams being multiplexed together exceeds the bitrate limit for target media.
Solution: Resample the data to a lower bitrate and try again.

Plays just about any audio or video format. Also comes with mencoder, which can re-code any file format that mplayer can display. Also emerge gmplayer for a GUI.

Audio and video are separete files: [g]mplayer -audiofile file.ac3 file.m2v

Play RealMedia (.rm) or RealAudio (.ra) streaming data: [g]mplayer -playlist URL

Interpreting status line (from mplayer FAQ):

• Prepare images: 720x480 J-PEGs.
• Couldn't get it to work. Processing pipeline crash while processing background image. Followed advice from a forum to change Main Menu VMGM > MPEG2 stream command to use:

  jpegtopnm "+BACKGROUND_FULL_NAME+" |
   ppmtoy4m -n 1 -F30000:1001 -A10:11 -I t -L -S 420mpeg2 |
   mpeg2enc -f 8 -n n -o "+TEMP_PATH+/+MENU_NAME+/menu.m2v"
  

  (note addition of -S 420mpeg2 to the ppmtoy4m command)
  
• Result: Almost finishes, but then dvdauthor complains that it Cannot parse video option '2.21:1' (given as the aspect ratio -- XML out > dvdauthor.xml) Apparently, my background image is the wrong size... except that it's not! I let qdvdauthor resize the image to 720x480 (which it already is), and it doesn't change anything. Try recreating the project from scratch and setting aspect ratio early.... didn't work -- it has a problem with the J-PEGs.
• If you make a mistake, the software will hang and restarting is difficult. Try cleaning out some files from ~/.qdvdauthor and waiting a while.
• Never did get this to work. Even with a slide show created with Cinelerra (see DVD Production Flow), qdvdauthor insisted the mpeg was 2.21:1, and dvdauthor refused to use this ratio. Too bad -- qdvdauthor appears to have a lot of flexibility. Used dvdstyler instead.
  

• Set-up requires painstaking editing to locate standard utilities. Better to edit ~/.qdvdauthor/qdvdauthor.ini manually for this.
• Sensitive to name changes -- don't change submenu names.
• Supports multiple movie files per title set, and chapters within each.
• Can show inset images or inset movies, and is able to zoom, shear, or rotate.
  
• Not able to control DVD state machine in any way other than menu navigation.
• Can't get main menu appear when DVD starts.
• Can't get buttons on menu to respond.
• For a DVD which plays start-to-finish without menu interaction, it works.

1. Use gdb to locate the libraries on the stack.
2. Check the versions of each.
3. Upgrade as appropriate (see Portage, Finding Package Dependencies).
   
4. Recompile library dependents, including transcode.