Notices

First of all I apologize, part of this post is from a post I made in another thread.
I figured this question deserved its own thread, since it was a little off topic and has not been answered in the other thread.

Hi, I've been looking for a solution to just edit videos taken with my N900 on my desktop. I have been unsuccessful. I currently run Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows xp. (Now ubuntu 10.04)
Here are some programs I've tried.
When I try using avidemux, I get problems with the audio becoming out of sync.
If I use kdenlive, the editing is painful because the preview is almost unwatchable with inaudible sound due to choppyness, and the final video has artifacts in it (no matter what format I render in)

I tried converting the video with ffmpeg first, in the hope that I could then edit without artifacts, but no luck there. The converted video also comes up with artifacts. (I also spent time in the #ffmpeg irc channel trying different command options suggested by others... always artifacts.)

My last resort, Sony Vegas does NOT support mp4 videos. I am at a loss for what to do. I've spent countless hours trying to make something work... but I finally gave up last week.
All I want is a tool to do simple editing for my N900 videos, on any platform. Can anyone who is doing this successfully share their story?

Thanks

i use this:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/zjggnj...verter_1.2.zip

makes .avi
settings 800x480 screensize
max fps @2000
and i leave everything else as it is
works perfect
theres an image of the settings i use in this thread somewhere and lots of sample vids:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=46357
and the encoder encodes lots of formats to avi

i use corel video studio pro x3. all my needs and more!

I tried converting to avi with this program... and I still get the artifacts. the video looks pixelated every so often.

Does anyone know of any Linux solutions to this?
Thanks

I am still looking for a solution to this problem.

Looking for a way to edit video TAKEN with the N900.

The suggestions above I believe refer to editing videos to play on the N900. Thank you for the response, but that wasn't exactly the question.

Does anyone have a linux solution to this that does NOT produce artifacts in the rendered videos?

Thank you

@dantonic

Perhaps a silly question, as you've already been to the #irc channel, but what version of ffmpeg are you actually using? I use an SVN version (r19352-4.0.5+SVN20090706-5), built on december 21 and use it quite often to convert movies taken with my n900.

So you convert movies taken with the N900 and you don't have any issue with the quality of the movies after conversion? Man that sounds so wonderful

I have:
FFmpeg version SVN-r0.5.1-4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1

Ah. I misunderstood you. I thought you wanted to edit on the n900 itself. On ubuntu, I've only tried avidemux, but had a different mileage than you. I am not at my private desktop now, but will try this at home tonight, as it's a bit weird that an older version on my n900 would be capable of doing what the newer ubuntu version would not be able to do.

I'll report back.

Sorry mate, for not getting back. Things have changed back home, as my gf has updated all machines to ubuntu 10.10, yesterday. So I have been playing around with the changes made. Will experiment a bit more, later on.

Hey dantonic, did you find a solution to this? I had the same problem on Lucid both with mplayer/mencoder and ffmpeg and came across your post. I suspect there was a problem with libavformat which is used by both applications and probably also the tools that you used to edit the videos.

I discovered that mplayer selects the wrong format and for some reason it makes the right selection when you pass it
-lavfdopts format=<anything>

For ffmpeg the only solution I could come up with was to build a newer version from source (I picked 0.6.1) In case you haven't done it before, just download the tarball, untar it, cd into the dir and type:

$ ./configure

$ make

(this takes a while)

$ sudo make install