OpenShot 2.0 Is Behind Schedule But Making Progress

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 13 January 2014 at 01:01 AM EST. 3 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
Last year the OpenShot open-source video editor project had a very successful Kickstarter campaign where they more than doubled their goal and raised $45k USD to work on "award-winning video editing for all", cross-platform support, and a host of new features. OpenShot went rather quiet recently, but there's now new updates on the project.

Kdenlive went dark last year (but is now in the process of being revived) while OpenShot also went dark for a while. Just a few days ago in the Phoronix Forums was a thread of OpenShot going dark too.

A Phoronix reader raised concernes since after the Kickstarter campaign there wasn't an update for nearly three months, the project site hadn't seen updates, the Ohloh code activity said OpenShot was "very low activity", and there wasn't any mainline activity for a while. Fortunately, fears of OpenShot going away or any nefarious intentions from the crowdfunding campaign can be laid to rest.

This weekend there's been new blog posts by Jonathan Thomas, the creator of OpenShot. The first update makes it clear right away that the OpenShot 2.0 beta plan of around Christmas wasn't reached, but progress is happening. The Qt port is advancing, the HTML timeline is being done, and the libopenshot library that does all the low-level work is being raised. Development of the Windows version of OpenShot 2.0 has been going slower and more challenging than anticipated compared to the Linux and OS X builds.

Originally OpenShot 2.0 was going to move to a Qt4 user-interface after the video editor was originally written for GTK. Jonathan Thomas shared that they are now using Qt5 over Qt4. With Qt5 they are also writing OpenShot in PyQt5 and Python 3.

In the second update Jonathan shared how they're storing video editing changes using JSON to make it a powerful and robust solution. The third and final update at this time hasn't yet been published but should be out at any time.

While it's running behind schedule, at least it looks like we'll see an exciting OpenShot 2.0 Python-based Qt5 video editor in 2014! More details on the project can be found at OpenShotVideo.com.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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