6 ms·

State of Kdenlive

469 points by f_r_d 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
embedding-shape 6mo ago
Interesting that they went to visit the Blender offices, considering Blender still has it's own video editor (that seems to be ramping up on receiving improvements as of late too) which is basically a "competitor" (as far as FOSS has competitors) to Kdenlive. I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?
- prmoustache 6mo ago
  Open source projects do not necessary see alternatives as "competitors" if they don't market/sell their software.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Great work responding to the only point I tried to make as weak as possible, and even provided an explanation for why it isn't "correct" in the first place...
    - nathanmills 6mo ago
      Calling FOSS devs "competitors" is such a corporate-minded statement that completely misses the point. FOSS devs all work together to achieve a common goal and don't see other projects as competitors, they see them as friends.
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        I agree, that what I literally tried to qualify it... Goddamn some of you seem to write comments with the sole purpose to disagree with the smallest of things.
      - elteto 6mo ago
        Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts gathering more attention/contributions because of better governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.
        darkwater 6mo ago
        Yes, but this is not a case of project hard fork, not even a soft fork. They are two completely unrelated projects. People contributing to KDE would probably not contribute to Gnome for a variety of reasons - and vice versa - and it's perfectly fine. One aspect of open source is biodiversity.
      - swaits 6mo ago
        Comrade, thank you for correcting the record. The word "competitor" has been retired from the lexicon effective immediately. All FOSS developers are friends. All FOSS developers have always been friends. Anyone who remembers otherwise will be assisted by the Ministry of Love in recovering the correct memory.
    - kristianp 6mo ago
      This is hacker news. Every opinion you write will be greeted with an argument for the opposite opinion. It's par for the course on here.
- TehCorwiz 6mo ago
  Blender is a wild untamed beast of a thousand panels. Those who wrangle the beast are wise and powerful. But they became that was from the journey. Kdenlive is a much more approachable quest for someone who is just entering the dungeon.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    What's great about Blender, is that if you learn the UI, controls and hotkeys for the purposes of 3D, you can basically use the same UI, controls and hotkeys for video editing, and vice-versa of course :) People overplay how unfriendly it is nowadays too, very far from how it was a decade ago, when it was really hard to understand how the UI and UX worked.
    - TehCorwiz 6mo ago
      Oh, don't get me wrong. I love it at tinker with it regularly. But power comes with complexity. It's always a trade off.
    - Narishma 6mo ago
      It's been ages since I last tried Blender, is it still unusable without a numpad?
      - 7jjjjjjj 6mo ago
        No, I use Blender a lot and don't even know what they have mapped to the numpad.
        embedding-shape 6mo ago
        I think I use Numpad 0 daily for "Change viewport view to camera view", but surely it can be rebound like most other shortcuts, don't think there is a requirement to have a Numpad, afaik.
  - eichin 6mo ago
    yeah, my one use of kdenlive has been to slap an on-screen telemetry track over a video - and it worked great for that, speaking as someone who has no interest in video editing :-)
popcar2 6mo ago
Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...
- Doohickey-d 6mo ago
  Changing project framerate is apparently quite a hard problem, even DaVinci Resolve when you change it, warns you that you cannot change it for that project again. Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the project framerate.
longitudinal93 6mo ago
After trying all the alternatives I can say that Kdenlive has become my goto for video editing. It's so great to see the team adding amazing new features and optimizing sub-systems. Well done.
aleda145 6mo ago
I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling! I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can. Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.
dadoomer 6mo ago
I've used Kdenlive for years. I'm someone who only needs video editing every once in a while, but even then I definitely recommend learning it.
echelon 6mo ago
Is Kdenlive owned/part of KDE? What's the story with KDE? How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes? Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes? How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.) Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.) Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
- pipeline_peak 6mo ago
  Google
  - deleted 6mo ago
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- freedomben 6mo ago
  > *Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc. If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a more "just works" kind of experience. Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to start.
- lunar_rover 6mo ago
  > How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes? KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute. > Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes? It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6. > How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.) GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS. > Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.) Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS. Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles. > Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon. Personally I like Fedora.
visiohex 6mo ago
Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of DaVinci Resolve. Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing to see how far open-source video editing has come.
- nathanmills 6mo ago
  Or with Tenacity insead of Audacity for the 100% invasive free software setup!
  - arcanemachiner 6mo ago
    I thought they rolled back those changes in a hurry.
- freedomben 6mo ago
  Same. They really thread that needle well IMHO. I choose to use Kdenlive over paid options, not because I have to, but because I want to. It's quality software, and it being free (in both aspects) is a dream come true.
- BodyCulture 6mo ago
  Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction. Choose wisely! Resolve is available for very little money and not only a much safer choice, but you will also learn to use an industry standard tool and might be able to monetise that skill one day. Kdenlive is a hobbiest project and is probably still ok for occasionally splitting a downloaded YouTube video or converting your OBS recordings, but never should you remotely think about using it for a project where you need to rely on your tools. The developers are not warning you enough, instead still trying to market this software as kind of a serious competitor to pro software, so I do that as a service for the aspiring video editor, taking your downvotes proudly as the price honest people have to pay. Yes, obviously I write from experience.
ekianjo 6mo ago
Good progress but kdenlive still cannot handle HDR videos
- f_r_d 6mo ago
  It is in the roadmap ;)
  - ekianjo 6mo ago
    I think something planned for this year right?
annnoo 6mo ago
Holy! When I moved over to Linux (2018ish) video and photo editing was still the thing, where I was still moving back to Windows or macOS But apparently I should really take another look at Kdenlive, looks like a lot of things have improved heavily, that it could hit the sweet spot between my love hate relationship with Resolve and the ease of use of Sony Vegas back in the day. Thanks for posting !
vladde 6mo ago
has someone here moved from DaVinci Resolve to Kdenlive? how was that experience? i just was a bit shocked to find out Resolve didn't support h.264 on their free tier on Linux, and i don't want to re-encode all my footage to AV1
- dasyatidprime 6mo ago
  Is that due to patent issues? A lot of people running open source H.264 codecs¹ on Linux just ignore the patents and assume they're under the radar, but I bet a high-profile commercial entity can't get away with that. Like as a point of comparison, I remember the Raspberry Pi selling add-on license keys for certain codecs at one point for a similar reason, but that probably doesn't look like such a good strategy for a video editor on a niche platform. Then there was the thing where Red Hat had some kind of licensing deal with Cisco… ¹ I don't remember which implementations are subject to this or what the actual terms are.
deleted 6mo ago
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magic_hamster 6mo ago
It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.
- riidom 6mo ago
  It sounds like you have no crash or corruption problems in Premiere at all.
- f_r_d 6mo ago
  Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously save.
- dirasieb 6mo ago
  just download davinci resolve for free
- Narishma 6mo ago
  > having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford Clearly you can, if you are currently using Premiere.
marginalia_nu 6mo ago
Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips. I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored. Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.
- ahartmetz 6mo ago
  You can write a bug report for each problem and attach a patch with the corresponding hack. Best thing you can do short of providing clean fixes.
- throwaway89201 6mo ago
  Creating the PR, doing the explanation you just did, and closing it yourself might be a good option. Then at least your code lives somewhere that someone else can reuse if desired. Ideally combined with a linked issue that you do keep open.
- throw101010 6mo ago
  I'd open a Draft PR and an Issue to explain the problems you encountered and how you've solved them for your own use cases... then leave it up to them to learn from it or close it. I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.
  - Rapzid 6mo ago
    This is a great comment. As someone who has been involved in managing a large (business backed) OSS project I can say that even if we preferred to have our own solutions to issues, we really valued comprehensive issues and draft PRs to reference. Sometimes you just don't have the time to get a PR to a projects mergeable standards, but the solution as a reference can have a ton of value for those that eventually get a PR across the finish line. I would say, though, that agentic coding seriously complicates the entire situation...
throwaway2046 6mo ago
That's quite the impressive feature set. I do want to use Kdenlive but coming from Shotcut I didn't find the UI as easy to use, especially when it comes to handling the timeline... Maybe I'll try it again one day.
- nine_k 6mo ago
  Just spend 3-4 days of quality time with it, watch a few youtube tutorials when stuck, and things will fall into place. (Same story, shotcut → kdenlive.)
pjmlp 6mo ago
Projects like this is why making languages like C++ safer is also relevant, we're not rewriting the world. Kudos for keeping improving Kdelive.
Daunk 6mo ago
Every KDE app I try (and the Plasma desktop) seems so good on paper, and they promise me the world! Then, wen I actually try them out, they always end up crashing or doing something weird. Like I cannot stand GIMP, so I've tried using Krita, but I don't think I've ever managed to finish something in it before it crashes. It's the same with Kdenlive. Damn shame.
- simonask 6mo ago
  I don’t use any KDE apps, but the Plasma desktop has been absolutely rock solid and super performant for me. I do think that the idea that each toolkit has its own native app for each thing you might want to do with a computer is a recipe for a forest of half-maintained nearly-good apps. A lot of the KDE and GNOME app suites feel like checking boxes.
- nine_k 6mo ago
  That's pretty weird; both Gimp and Krita (very different tools) were rock-solid to me. Speaking of KDEnlive, I experienced a few anomalies and crashes using the version from my distro; I switched to an AppImage version, and with it, everything Just Works™. I suspect your crashes may also be related to dependencies, not some deficiencies of the application itself. Try a different build / AppImage / Flatpak, and see if you encounter the same problems.
- WD-42 6mo ago
  The entire KDE ecosystem is basically stuck on c++ I imagine the number of people volunteering to work on it in their free time isn’t exactly skyrocketing.
yesimahuman 6mo ago
Kdenlive is amazing. As someone that learned basic video editing through cracked versions of Premiere growing up, I love that a completely free tool can do everything I need for editing without the nonsense of basic editors or tools like Clipchamp that lock ffmpeg flags like 4k rendering behind paid gates. My only issue with the tool right now is crashing and corrupted backups which happened a few times on the video I edited a few weeks ago.
pteraspidomorph 6mo ago
I can confirm that it got more stable for me in 2025. Good job!
bttmchnd 6mo ago
Related: Niccolò Venerandi (a KDE developer) criticizes Kdenlive and proposes a proof of concept of a QML-based node-based video editor using shaders to achieve full GPU acceleration for everything (Kdenlive doesn't use GPU/is unstable and hiccups) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlgrCqgnk-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlgrCqgnk-M
- WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
  This is a pretty neat project idea and presentation! I hope this goes well. I'm honestly surprised (shocked!) that video editors don't use a GPU ("video card") for rendering and that it's all CPU based. That would, honestly, never have occurred to me to even try and do this in CPU. Is this merely decades of historical baggage?
nickjj 6mo ago
I wish Kdenlive had 2 things: 1. A way to play back videos at 2x speed while editing in an intuitive way (DaVinci Resolve does this perfectly). TBH I'm not sure how this isn't a feature since it's straight up a 2x time saver for anyone editing a video since playing back a 10 minute at 2x is only 5 minutes of real life time. With Resolve I can actively edit / cut / etc. my videos at 2x speed playback but the exported video comes out as 1x. In other words, this isn't a request to adjust the clip speed, it's 100% limited to playback in the editor. Also audio playback is perfect, it sounds exactly like a YouTube video being played at 2x. With Kdenlive live you have to adjust the playback speed after every time you make a cut (stopping the video) which is very not user friendly and I don't know what algorithm they are using but the audio sounds really poor at 2x. It seems to skip every other frame of audio so it sounds like it's constantly dropping out and not smooth. 2. A revamped title creator so creating titles is as fast and easy as Camtasia.
- tester457 6mo ago
  I wish Kdenlive had an api so that I could improve the QOL for myself.
  - BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
    It is open source so you still can but I concede that's probably easier with plugins.
- blt 6mo ago
  The title creator is bad... as a total amateur who needs to edit a video every now and then, it hurt me.
- mudkipdev 6mo ago
  If anyone has a better workflow for creating lots of captions in kdenlive please let me know. I had to duplicate each title to the media library and drag it into the timeline, because if I simply copy/pasted then the text content/styling would be shared across instances
- MrDrMcCoy 6mo ago
Rapzid 6mo ago
A couple years ago I did some basic OBS recording of technical stuff and needed a simple, preferably OSS, editing and compositing solution polish up the vids. The landscape was bonkers. After trying lots of free, freemium, and paid trials I finally landed on Kdenlive. At the time I got the sense that it had just recently, within the past couple(max) years, gotten much better and much more usable than a lot of the internet had caught on to. I'd liken it to the Blender 2.5 release. It was perfectly usable on my system for editing 4k video with my basic needs. Haven't used it over the past couple years but it's nice to see that they have been pushing it forward even harder. Even based on my 2-3 year old experience with it I'd encourage anyone looking for basic, but comprehensive, video editing needs to give it a go. Edit: I'm not saying it's limited to basic editing. I just mean that it's perfectly adequate and usable without being overwhelming and "unfriendly". Watch a Youtube Kdenlive 101 intro vid and you're good to go.
accelbred 6mo ago
Kdenlive is great. With zero video-editing experience, I was able to easily edit a demo video, cutting portions, clipping pauses, etc.
jccx70 6mo ago
[dead]
Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
Other options for Mac/Win/Linux =3 Davinci Resolve * CorridorKey plugin (cutting edge green/blue screen "AI" masking) * Blender EXR workflows * Paid (unless buying a really expensive camera) https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runtime/tree/main https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runti... Cinelerra GG * less popular, but had GPU cluster acceleration at one point * FOSS https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages Shotcut * simple to learn * compatible with most platforms, but slow * FOSS https://www.shotcut.org/download/ https://www.shotcut.org/download/
- 72deluxe 6mo ago
  What is slow about Shotcut? Genuinely curious
  - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
    Shotcut can only leverage the GPU hardware acceleration during the render output phase. Typically, some people get a DaVinci Resolve license card when buying the "Speed Editor" hardware for a $100 more than just the software. That silly little wheel does wonders for quickly scrubbing though media. GPU VRAM starts to matter again as color grading is one area people want to see preview quickly. Best regards =3
    - 72deluxe 6mo ago
      Very informative, thank you. I have been using Shotcut for a while and wrote a frei0r plugin but it needs migrating to the new 10 bit MLT framework. I have been using Shotcut with 4K footage and it is indeed very slow so I have been using proxy files. I did have PowerDirector but have been very disappointed with it so wrote a converter to convert their format to Shotcut's XML format so I can move my projects to Shotcut. Ideally I'd use DaVinci Resolve but as the free one doesn't support 10 bit I can't try any of the HLG videos I shot on holiday.
bigbugbag 6mo ago
it's been 3 years since I completely gave up on kdenlive. I put time and effort to get around the dated and unintuitive UI/UX, but it is too convoluted to do even some basic stuff. and the repeated crashes are too much of a pain to be ready for everyday use. I tried alternatives such as openshot and shotcut, but they too have a lot of room for improvement. it seems there always a flaw of some kind and a lack of usability for this kind of software. not taking anything for the time, efforts ad good will the devs put into these software, and many thanks to them for everything. but commercial software benefits from the years of having team of full time employees giving them a serious edge on opensource software for video editing.
grg0 6mo ago
Very thankful for this video editor.
wvlia5 6mo ago
I tried it 10 years ago and it was very buggy, crashing and freezing. The main option was Openshot, which was also in development and buggy (something happened then, that Openshot almost stopped development). There was no good foss option, so I settled for Sony Vegas from pirate bay.
- davidgerard 6mo ago
  Openshot is alive and well and actively developed, but it's still buggy as hell. I use it 'cos it's super simple and so easy to use, but e.g. I use a specific daily build 'cos release 3.5.1 broke libopus again.
Fr0styMatt88 6mo ago
How does it compare to Blender’s VSE? I’ve used both for different tiny projects but I’m interested to hear from anyone using them more in-depth.
mythrwy 6mo ago
I like Kdenlive, but for the simple video editing I do (cuts, splices, remove/replace audio, freeze frame etc) the fastest thing is ffmpeg. I just give an LLM a list of files, a set of steps and timestamps, a directory to work in and have it write a bash script that calls ffmpeg. I just view the source videos with VLC and get the timestamps I want. I mostly use this to edit my YouTube videos and this really beats importing files, dragging things around and all that and it only takes a few minutes to edit now.
timonoko 6mo ago
I have I have been using Cinerella for about 30 years. I asked Gemini about it and it told me there would be nothing new or exciting in Kdenlive. Only recently it started to be a worthy competitor.
vjay15 6mo ago
kdenlive is really good

469 points by f_r_d 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

Interesting that they went to visit the Blender offices, considering Blender still has it's own video editor (that seems to be ramping up on receiving improvements as of late too) which is basically a "competitor" (as far as FOSS has competitors) to Kdenlive. I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?

prmoustache 6mo ago
Open source projects do not necessary see alternatives as "competitors" if they don't market/sell their software.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Great work responding to the only point I tried to make as weak as possible, and even provided an explanation for why it isn't "correct" in the first place...
  - nathanmills 6mo ago
    Calling FOSS devs "competitors" is such a corporate-minded statement that completely misses the point. FOSS devs all work together to achieve a common goal and don't see other projects as competitors, they see them as friends.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      I agree, that what I literally tried to qualify it... Goddamn some of you seem to write comments with the sole purpose to disagree with the smallest of things.
    - elteto 6mo ago
      Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts gathering more attention/contributions because of better governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.
      - darkwater 6mo ago
        Yes, but this is not a case of project hard fork, not even a soft fork. They are two completely unrelated projects. People contributing to KDE would probably not contribute to Gnome for a variety of reasons - and vice versa - and it's perfectly fine. One aspect of open source is biodiversity.
    - swaits 6mo ago
      Comrade, thank you for correcting the record. The word "competitor" has been retired from the lexicon effective immediately. All FOSS developers are friends. All FOSS developers have always been friends. Anyone who remembers otherwise will be assisted by the Ministry of Love in recovering the correct memory.
  - kristianp 6mo ago
    This is hacker news. Every opinion you write will be greeted with an argument for the opposite opinion. It's par for the course on here.
TehCorwiz 6mo ago
Blender is a wild untamed beast of a thousand panels. Those who wrangle the beast are wise and powerful. But they became that was from the journey. Kdenlive is a much more approachable quest for someone who is just entering the dungeon.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  What's great about Blender, is that if you learn the UI, controls and hotkeys for the purposes of 3D, you can basically use the same UI, controls and hotkeys for video editing, and vice-versa of course :) People overplay how unfriendly it is nowadays too, very far from how it was a decade ago, when it was really hard to understand how the UI and UX worked.
  - TehCorwiz 6mo ago
    Oh, don't get me wrong. I love it at tinker with it regularly. But power comes with complexity. It's always a trade off.
  - Narishma 6mo ago
    It's been ages since I last tried Blender, is it still unusable without a numpad?
    - 7jjjjjjj 6mo ago
      No, I use Blender a lot and don't even know what they have mapped to the numpad.
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        I think I use Numpad 0 daily for "Change viewport view to camera view", but surely it can be rebound like most other shortcuts, don't think there is a requirement to have a Numpad, afaik.
- eichin 6mo ago
  yeah, my one use of kdenlive has been to slap an on-screen telemetry track over a video - and it worked great for that, speaking as someone who has no interest in video editing :-)

popcar2 6mo ago

Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...

Doohickey-d 6mo ago
Changing project framerate is apparently quite a hard problem, even DaVinci Resolve when you change it, warns you that you cannot change it for that project again. Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the project framerate.

longitudinal93 6mo ago

After trying all the alternatives I can say that Kdenlive has become my goto for video editing. It's so great to see the team adding amazing new features and optimizing sub-systems. Well done.

aleda145 6mo ago

I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling! I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can. Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.

dadoomer 6mo ago

I've used Kdenlive for years. I'm someone who only needs video editing every once in a while, but even then I definitely recommend learning it.

echelon 6mo ago

Is Kdenlive owned/part of KDE? What's the story with KDE? How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes? Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes? How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.) Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.) Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.

pipeline_peak 6mo ago
Google
- deleted 6mo ago
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freedomben 6mo ago
> *Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc. If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a more "just works" kind of experience. Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to start.
lunar_rover 6mo ago
> How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes? KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute. > Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes? It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6. > How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.) GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS. > Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.) Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS. Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles. > Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon. Personally I like Fedora.

visiohex 6mo ago

Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of DaVinci Resolve. Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing to see how far open-source video editing has come.

nathanmills 6mo ago
Or with Tenacity insead of Audacity for the 100% invasive free software setup!
- arcanemachiner 6mo ago
  I thought they rolled back those changes in a hurry.
freedomben 6mo ago
Same. They really thread that needle well IMHO. I choose to use Kdenlive over paid options, not because I have to, but because I want to. It's quality software, and it being free (in both aspects) is a dream come true.
BodyCulture 6mo ago
Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction. Choose wisely! Resolve is available for very little money and not only a much safer choice, but you will also learn to use an industry standard tool and might be able to monetise that skill one day. Kdenlive is a hobbiest project and is probably still ok for occasionally splitting a downloaded YouTube video or converting your OBS recordings, but never should you remotely think about using it for a project where you need to rely on your tools. The developers are not warning you enough, instead still trying to market this software as kind of a serious competitor to pro software, so I do that as a service for the aspiring video editor, taking your downvotes proudly as the price honest people have to pay. Yes, obviously I write from experience.

ekianjo 6mo ago

Good progress but kdenlive still cannot handle HDR videos

f_r_d 6mo ago
It is in the roadmap ;)
- ekianjo 6mo ago
  I think something planned for this year right?

annnoo 6mo ago

Holy! When I moved over to Linux (2018ish) video and photo editing was still the thing, where I was still moving back to Windows or macOS But apparently I should really take another look at Kdenlive, looks like a lot of things have improved heavily, that it could hit the sweet spot between my love hate relationship with Resolve and the ease of use of Sony Vegas back in the day. Thanks for posting !

vladde 6mo ago

has someone here moved from DaVinci Resolve to Kdenlive? how was that experience? i just was a bit shocked to find out Resolve didn't support h.264 on their free tier on Linux, and i don't want to re-encode all my footage to AV1

dasyatidprime 6mo ago
Is that due to patent issues? A lot of people running open source H.264 codecs¹ on Linux just ignore the patents and assume they're under the radar, but I bet a high-profile commercial entity can't get away with that. Like as a point of comparison, I remember the Raspberry Pi selling add-on license keys for certain codecs at one point for a similar reason, but that probably doesn't look like such a good strategy for a video editor on a niche platform. Then there was the thing where Red Hat had some kind of licensing deal with Cisco… ¹ I don't remember which implementations are subject to this or what the actual terms are.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

magic_hamster 6mo ago

It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.

riidom 6mo ago
It sounds like you have no crash or corruption problems in Premiere at all.
f_r_d 6mo ago
Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously save.
dirasieb 6mo ago
just download davinci resolve for free
Narishma 6mo ago
> having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford Clearly you can, if you are currently using Premiere.

marginalia_nu 6mo ago

Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips. I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored. Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.

ahartmetz 6mo ago
You can write a bug report for each problem and attach a patch with the corresponding hack. Best thing you can do short of providing clean fixes.
throwaway89201 6mo ago
Creating the PR, doing the explanation you just did, and closing it yourself might be a good option. Then at least your code lives somewhere that someone else can reuse if desired. Ideally combined with a linked issue that you do keep open.
throw101010 6mo ago
I'd open a Draft PR and an Issue to explain the problems you encountered and how you've solved them for your own use cases... then leave it up to them to learn from it or close it. I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.
- Rapzid 6mo ago
  This is a great comment. As someone who has been involved in managing a large (business backed) OSS project I can say that even if we preferred to have our own solutions to issues, we really valued comprehensive issues and draft PRs to reference. Sometimes you just don't have the time to get a PR to a projects mergeable standards, but the solution as a reference can have a ton of value for those that eventually get a PR across the finish line. I would say, though, that agentic coding seriously complicates the entire situation...

throwaway2046 6mo ago

That's quite the impressive feature set. I do want to use Kdenlive but coming from Shotcut I didn't find the UI as easy to use, especially when it comes to handling the timeline... Maybe I'll try it again one day.

nine_k 6mo ago
Just spend 3-4 days of quality time with it, watch a few youtube tutorials when stuck, and things will fall into place. (Same story, shotcut → kdenlive.)

pjmlp 6mo ago

Projects like this is why making languages like C++ safer is also relevant, we're not rewriting the world. Kudos for keeping improving Kdelive.

Daunk 6mo ago

Every KDE app I try (and the Plasma desktop) seems so good on paper, and they promise me the world! Then, wen I actually try them out, they always end up crashing or doing something weird. Like I cannot stand GIMP, so I've tried using Krita, but I don't think I've ever managed to finish something in it before it crashes. It's the same with Kdenlive. Damn shame.

simonask 6mo ago
I don’t use any KDE apps, but the Plasma desktop has been absolutely rock solid and super performant for me. I do think that the idea that each toolkit has its own native app for each thing you might want to do with a computer is a recipe for a forest of half-maintained nearly-good apps. A lot of the KDE and GNOME app suites feel like checking boxes.
nine_k 6mo ago
That's pretty weird; both Gimp and Krita (very different tools) were rock-solid to me. Speaking of KDEnlive, I experienced a few anomalies and crashes using the version from my distro; I switched to an AppImage version, and with it, everything Just Works™. I suspect your crashes may also be related to dependencies, not some deficiencies of the application itself. Try a different build / AppImage / Flatpak, and see if you encounter the same problems.
WD-42 6mo ago
The entire KDE ecosystem is basically stuck on c++ I imagine the number of people volunteering to work on it in their free time isn’t exactly skyrocketing.

yesimahuman 6mo ago

Kdenlive is amazing. As someone that learned basic video editing through cracked versions of Premiere growing up, I love that a completely free tool can do everything I need for editing without the nonsense of basic editors or tools like Clipchamp that lock ffmpeg flags like 4k rendering behind paid gates. My only issue with the tool right now is crashing and corrupted backups which happened a few times on the video I edited a few weeks ago.

pteraspidomorph 6mo ago

I can confirm that it got more stable for me in 2025. Good job!

bttmchnd 6mo ago

Related: Niccolò Venerandi (a KDE developer) criticizes Kdenlive and proposes a proof of concept of a QML-based node-based video editor using shaders to achieve full GPU acceleration for everything (Kdenlive doesn't use GPU/is unstable and hiccups) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlgrCqgnk-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlgrCqgnk-M

WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
This is a pretty neat project idea and presentation! I hope this goes well. I'm honestly surprised (shocked!) that video editors don't use a GPU ("video card") for rendering and that it's all CPU based. That would, honestly, never have occurred to me to even try and do this in CPU. Is this merely decades of historical baggage?

nickjj 6mo ago

I wish Kdenlive had 2 things: 1. A way to play back videos at 2x speed while editing in an intuitive way (DaVinci Resolve does this perfectly). TBH I'm not sure how this isn't a feature since it's straight up a 2x time saver for anyone editing a video since playing back a 10 minute at 2x is only 5 minutes of real life time. With Resolve I can actively edit / cut / etc. my videos at 2x speed playback but the exported video comes out as 1x. In other words, this isn't a request to adjust the clip speed, it's 100% limited to playback in the editor. Also audio playback is perfect, it sounds exactly like a YouTube video being played at 2x. With Kdenlive live you have to adjust the playback speed after every time you make a cut (stopping the video) which is very not user friendly and I don't know what algorithm they are using but the audio sounds really poor at 2x. It seems to skip every other frame of audio so it sounds like it's constantly dropping out and not smooth. 2. A revamped title creator so creating titles is as fast and easy as Camtasia.

tester457 6mo ago
I wish Kdenlive had an api so that I could improve the QOL for myself.
- BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
  It is open source so you still can but I concede that's probably easier with plugins.
blt 6mo ago
The title creator is bad... as a total amateur who needs to edit a video every now and then, it hurt me.
mudkipdev 6mo ago
If anyone has a better workflow for creating lots of captions in kdenlive please let me know. I had to duplicate each title to the media library and drag it into the timeline, because if I simply copy/pasted then the text content/styling would be shared across instances
MrDrMcCoy 6mo ago

Rapzid 6mo ago

A couple years ago I did some basic OBS recording of technical stuff and needed a simple, preferably OSS, editing and compositing solution polish up the vids. The landscape was bonkers. After trying lots of free, freemium, and paid trials I finally landed on Kdenlive. At the time I got the sense that it had just recently, within the past couple(max) years, gotten much better and much more usable than a lot of the internet had caught on to. I'd liken it to the Blender 2.5 release. It was perfectly usable on my system for editing 4k video with my basic needs. Haven't used it over the past couple years but it's nice to see that they have been pushing it forward even harder. Even based on my 2-3 year old experience with it I'd encourage anyone looking for basic, but comprehensive, video editing needs to give it a go. Edit: I'm not saying it's limited to basic editing. I just mean that it's perfectly adequate and usable without being overwhelming and "unfriendly". Watch a Youtube Kdenlive 101 intro vid and you're good to go.

accelbred 6mo ago

Kdenlive is great. With zero video-editing experience, I was able to easily edit a demo video, cutting portions, clipping pauses, etc.

jccx70 6mo ago

[dead]

Joel_Mckay 6mo ago

Other options for Mac/Win/Linux =3 Davinci Resolve * CorridorKey plugin (cutting edge green/blue screen "AI" masking) * Blender EXR workflows * Paid (unless buying a really expensive camera) https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runtime/tree/main https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runti... Cinelerra GG * less popular, but had GPU cluster acceleration at one point * FOSS https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages Shotcut * simple to learn * compatible with most platforms, but slow * FOSS https://www.shotcut.org/download/ https://www.shotcut.org/download/

72deluxe 6mo ago
What is slow about Shotcut? Genuinely curious
- Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
  Shotcut can only leverage the GPU hardware acceleration during the render output phase. Typically, some people get a DaVinci Resolve license card when buying the "Speed Editor" hardware for a $100 more than just the software. That silly little wheel does wonders for quickly scrubbing though media. GPU VRAM starts to matter again as color grading is one area people want to see preview quickly. Best regards =3
  - 72deluxe 6mo ago
    Very informative, thank you. I have been using Shotcut for a while and wrote a frei0r plugin but it needs migrating to the new 10 bit MLT framework. I have been using Shotcut with 4K footage and it is indeed very slow so I have been using proxy files. I did have PowerDirector but have been very disappointed with it so wrote a converter to convert their format to Shotcut's XML format so I can move my projects to Shotcut. Ideally I'd use DaVinci Resolve but as the free one doesn't support 10 bit I can't try any of the HLG videos I shot on holiday.

bigbugbag 6mo ago

it's been 3 years since I completely gave up on kdenlive. I put time and effort to get around the dated and unintuitive UI/UX, but it is too convoluted to do even some basic stuff. and the repeated crashes are too much of a pain to be ready for everyday use. I tried alternatives such as openshot and shotcut, but they too have a lot of room for improvement. it seems there always a flaw of some kind and a lack of usability for this kind of software. not taking anything for the time, efforts ad good will the devs put into these software, and many thanks to them for everything. but commercial software benefits from the years of having team of full time employees giving them a serious edge on opensource software for video editing.

grg0 6mo ago

Very thankful for this video editor.

wvlia5 6mo ago

I tried it 10 years ago and it was very buggy, crashing and freezing. The main option was Openshot, which was also in development and buggy (something happened then, that Openshot almost stopped development). There was no good foss option, so I settled for Sony Vegas from pirate bay.

davidgerard 6mo ago
Openshot is alive and well and actively developed, but it's still buggy as hell. I use it 'cos it's super simple and so easy to use, but e.g. I use a specific daily build 'cos release 3.5.1 broke libopus again.

Fr0styMatt88 6mo ago

How does it compare to Blender’s VSE? I’ve used both for different tiny projects but I’m interested to hear from anyone using them more in-depth.

mythrwy 6mo ago

I like Kdenlive, but for the simple video editing I do (cuts, splices, remove/replace audio, freeze frame etc) the fastest thing is ffmpeg. I just give an LLM a list of files, a set of steps and timestamps, a directory to work in and have it write a bash script that calls ffmpeg. I just view the source videos with VLC and get the timestamps I want. I mostly use this to edit my YouTube videos and this really beats importing files, dragging things around and all that and it only takes a few minutes to edit now.

timonoko 6mo ago

I have I have been using Cinerella for about 30 years. I asked Gemini about it and it told me there would be nothing new or exciting in Kdenlive. Only recently it started to be a worthy competitor.

vjay15 6mo ago

kdenlive is really good