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Has there ever been an attempt to build a FLOSS video editor pinned to a single distro and a single piece of hardware (or at least single GPU)? It just seems l

Has there ever been an attempt to build a FLOSS video editor pinned to a single distro and a single piece of hardware (or at least single GPU)? It just seems like Linux cannot currently guarantee anything about the stability or even existence of GPU-acceleration on an arbitrary machine. So to start with that and then smear the software across multiple LTS versions of multiple distros seems like a perfect recipe for our current reality. Could maybe even build a funding model off of that. Compare a fundraiser trying to gain general stability for a buggy video editor to a fundraiser for getting "Paradise Video Editor" to extend its rock solid UX to a 2nd piece of hardware. I bet the maker of that hardware would find value in such support. :)

shmerl 8y ago
General purpose GPU acceleration is accessible through standard APIs like Vulkan. If you mean specialized GPU video encoding / decoding, there is VAAPI, which is also pretty much supported on all GPUs and distros. But selection of particular codecs depends on the hardware.
- jancsika 8y ago
  No, I mean limiting support to X distro on Y arch with Z GPU. Any usage outside of those constraints is completely unsupported and isn't allowed to be added to an official bug report. For example, let's say Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on x86_64 with GPU... (dunno, choose a decent one that has a respectable open source driver). Here's my question-- how much more stable would such a video editor be than the extant ones that ship with general Linux support? I'm asking because I see lots of reports that so-and-so crashes because the user installed from the ancient Debian package, or the Nvidia driver is garbage, or some library doesn't play well on some distro/arch/distro-arch-combo. I'm just curious how much of the eternal bugginess of Linux video editors can be ascribed to those problems vs. the more narrow problem of designing fast-and-stable video editing software.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    I see no reason to support ancient drivers and ancient distros. Supporting recent enough ones is expected. But there is no point to limit architectures as long as given setup has GPU with enough functionality to provide hardware acceleration and drivers that expose that.

shmerl 8y ago

General purpose GPU acceleration is accessible through standard APIs like Vulkan. If you mean specialized GPU video encoding / decoding, there is VAAPI, which is also pretty much supported on all GPUs and distros. But selection of particular codecs depends on the hardware.

jancsika 8y ago
No, I mean limiting support to X distro on Y arch with Z GPU. Any usage outside of those constraints is completely unsupported and isn't allowed to be added to an official bug report. For example, let's say Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on x86_64 with GPU... (dunno, choose a decent one that has a respectable open source driver). Here's my question-- how much more stable would such a video editor be than the extant ones that ship with general Linux support? I'm asking because I see lots of reports that so-and-so crashes because the user installed from the ancient Debian package, or the Nvidia driver is garbage, or some library doesn't play well on some distro/arch/distro-arch-combo. I'm just curious how much of the eternal bugginess of Linux video editors can be ascribed to those problems vs. the more narrow problem of designing fast-and-stable video editing software.
- shmerl 8y ago
  I see no reason to support ancient drivers and ancient distros. Supporting recent enough ones is expected. But there is no point to limit architectures as long as given setup has GPU with enough functionality to provide hardware acceleration and drivers that expose that.