OpenShot 3.0 Released With Many Open-Source Video Editing Enhancements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenShot 3.0 Released With Many Open-Source Video Editing Enhancements

For those thinking about what open-source non-linear video editor to try out this holiday season for any videos, OpenShot 3.0 was officially released today as a big step forward for that project...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenShot-3.0-Released

[icewater]

Does this thing still phone home to Google? This was the first video editor I used a couple of years ago, but I switched to kdenlive when I saw the requests going out in the terminal.

[hamishmb]

I hope it's more stable now. Back in the day, I used Openshot 1.x, but after 2.x came out it became completely unusable for me. Mind, I was using an NVIDIA GPU at the time, with the nonfree drivers.

[waxhead]

Does this thing still phone home to Google? This was the first video editor I used a couple of years ago, but I switched to kdenlive when I saw the requests going out in the terminal.

It does/did? ... if this is the case I will continue to stick with Blender's video editor which I just have started to try out.

[direc85]

Does this thing still phone home to Google? This was the first video editor I used a couple of years ago, but I switched to kdenlive when I saw the requests going out in the terminal.

It looks like this issue: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt/issues/4735

TL;DR Google Analytics, anonymized, used for tracking the number of installations and number of active users. Optional feature; install offline, start offline, disable analytics in settings and you're good to go online again

I personally accept that kind of statistics, although it must still be explicitly enabled, which isn't the case here, sadly.

[vegabook]

Does this thing still phone home to Google? This was the first video editor I used a couple of years ago, but I switched to kdenlive when I saw the requests going out in the terminal.

Maybe you'd prefer to force all software to SaaS-up and move into the browser, where your entire activity stream down to machine learning your personal mouse movement fingerprint, will be open kimono and sold? Once that happens you'll wish you had allowed this trickle of anonymized usage data to help bare-metal software to survive.

[Old Grouch]

Maybe you'd prefer to force all software to SaaS-up and move into the browser, where your entire activity stream down to machine learning your personal mouse movement fingerprint, will be open kimono and sold? Once that happens you'll wish you had allowed this trickle of anonymized usage data to help bare-metal software to survive.

Allowing one unacceptable behaviour because another unacceptable behaviour is worse seems like odd logic.

[schmidtbag]

Maybe you'd prefer to force all software to SaaS-up and move into the browser, where your entire activity stream down to machine learning your personal mouse movement fingerprint, will be open kimono and sold? Once that happens you'll wish you had allowed this trickle of anonymized usage data to help bare-metal software to survive.

That sounds overly drastic/dramatic. For one thing, this anonymized data collection is not necessary for this project to survive. It's helpful, but they could also just get download reports from their website, distros, and other mirrors. After all, the data collection is optional, so they're only going to get a rough approximation of their userbase anyway.
Also, SaaS isn't viable for FLOSS. It's an obvious choice for paid (whether that be money or your personal data) users, because it reduces piracy and allows for a more consistent revenue stream, while also making sure everyone is up-to-date. OpenShot is never going to be SaaS. Perhaps it may one day have a web interface, but you would have to host the server for it, in the same way Collabora Online works.

So yeah, relax. Of all the things regarding open source and/or data collection to get all apocalyptic about, this is far from the top of the list.

[icewater]

install offline, start offline, disable analytics in settings and you're good to go online again

yeah.... no. Make any data collection opt-in, and don't make me jump through hoops to do otherwise.

[prokoudine]

they could also just get download reports from their website, distros, and other mirrors.

What is your hands-on experience doing that, please?