TuxRunner

I just discovered Kino (yes, I moved the rock I’ve been living under).  Since I’ve been home resting and recovering from a surgery, the wife had an idea for me to transfer all our digital video from an old Canon video camera over to the Drobo.  I’ve only done this once in the past with a Windows laptop and a Firewire card using the built-in tools in Windows.  So I set out on a mission to find something that would do the same under Linux.

Turns out there’s actually a handful of good applications out there for Linux that can be used for video editing.  Since I’m no pro, I found Kino to have a very good basic interface that’s easy to learn, and it out of the box supports the ability to capture video from any Firewire-connected video device.  Even has the ability to control your camera using on-screen buttons for rewind, play, pause, fast-forward, and more.

The only glitch I kept running into is a problem with the permissions on /dev/raw1394, which appear to be 660 by default in Linux Mint 7 (Ubuntu 9.04).  Kino wants read/write access to this device (which happens to be my video camera), so all I had to do is “chmod 666 /dev/raw1394″ and then Kino was able to fully access my video camera.

I won’t get into how to use it (that’s what docs are for), but it’s really simple to start up a capture.  Once captured, you can edit the clips however you want (I probably won’t do any editing though), and then export it to MPEG or various other formats (provided you have the proper libraries installed).  Kino seems to be a fairly good app for doing non-linear video editing and capturing if all you need are some simple, basic tools to get the job done.

Find it here, or check your distro repo for a copy:   http://www.kinodv.org/