Multimedia For Linux

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3' target='_blank'>http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3</a><br /><br /></div>Two pieces of software have recently been released to aid Linux users enjoy a fuller multimedia experience.<br /><br />"A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was <a href="http://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/10/2016257.shtml?tid=99">pulled from release</a> with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability." Anyways, the successor to that program, called <a href="http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3">Cinelerra</a> (most recent version 1.1.9) is now available and looks like it has a host of features giving our Linux friends a robust tool to use. <br /><br />Also, after almost two years of development, the free cross-platform sound editor <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>, has a new stable version for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Audacity 1.2 has introduced brand new features and major improvements including professional-quality dithering and resampling, and new pitch- and speed-changing effects.

[Gary Sheynkman]

Since I dont know a thing about Linux I will ask our "Dr."

Do you find that linux (due to its larger dependancy of HD speed rather than on raw cpu power) makes for a better multimedia editing machine?

[Suhit Gupta]

Since I dont know a thing about Linux I will ask our "Dr."

Do you find that linux (due to its larger dependancy of HD speed rather than on raw cpu power) makes for a better multimedia editing machine?
I have played a fair bit with Linux, however, I have never had the opportunity to do any multimedia editing on the OS. I have only edited videos on Windows and MacOS. So, regarding your question, I can mainly just hypothesize.

I wouldn't really say that Linux is dependent on HDD speed, at least no more so than Windows or MacOS. After all, all three OS's use virtual memory. Multimedia editing and video capturing and encoding is mainly a CPU bound operation. And unfortunately, platform-specific assembly language is becoming more and more important as newer CPUs rely more on vectored assembly language to gain performance. So ultimately it comes down to the way the program is written for the particular OS and the particular CPU coupled with that OS. Having said this, Linux is a much more lightweight OS compared to Windows or MacOS. So it is easier to reduce the load on the machine and thus freeing up resources for other operations (in this case - multimedia). So, all things being equal, it should potentially be possible to get better results.

Suhit

[Janak Parekh]

Do you find that linux (due to its larger dependancy of HD speed rather than on raw cpu power) makes for a better multimedia editing machine?
Suhit makes salient points, but for now, the lack of "prosumer" tools on Linux is the biggest handicap. On the flipside, the OS's customizability makes it very popular for custom-design graphics houses and such (doesn't Pixar use Linux?)

--janak