[SOLVED] Kino transitions and export not working

[KernelPanic]

I installed Kino 1.3.4 on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. It runs, import, etc. all normally. However, when a transition is created, the preview is perfect but its stored version (the temporary .dv file) is a still video of a single frame. The same worked on previous versions of Ubuntu.

I dug a bit and found some info, such as: it only shows the first frame of the next sequence; the issue affects saving to file, even when a transition is applied to color fading; the length is correct; etc. I have rebuilt kino 1.3.4 from the sources and it just worked.

Here came the second issue: mjpeg exporting was not working, with ffmpeg quitting with:

> Unrecognized option 'ildct'.
> Error splitting the argument list: Option not found

I tried to replicate the pipe options given to ffmpeg to understand where was the issue. 'ildct' "recently" (tm) became a flag rather than a standalone option, so I assumed that the obsolete option was used to ffmpeg command line; but this was not the case, because in ffmpeg_utils.sh the right version of the flags (-ildct or -flags +ildct) is used depending on the version of ffmpeg.

And how is this version checked? Grepping "flags" and other keywords from "ffmpeg_help=`ffmpeg -h 2>&1`. And *that* has changed in the years for ffmpeg. Now ffmpeg reports the complete set of options only with "full". I changed that to

ffmpeg_help=`ffmpeg -h full 2>&1`

and exporting started working again. Note: you might need to make && sudo make install again after this change.

I know kino is not maintained anymore, but it might still be useful to some and it has a unique feature: it's very nice when you need to fade across many small and big samples, which are shown in a list and it is easy to remove a single one. More powerful non-linear editors rely on a timeline with sizes proportional to the clip lengths, resulting in very hard browsing and zooming if you need to work on simple transitions between clips with very different sizes. Plus, removing a clip in a timeline can be really painful (e.g. need to shift tracks, can't select transitions because they are tiny with respect to clips, etc.)

So I do not hope that this will be fixed anytime soon, but I hope that this information will help other kino enthusiasts like me.

[KernelPanic (jfrusciante)]

Note: the issue can be solved with the fix above or with downgrading ffmpeg; this could be indicated in the package.