Install binary packages

Multimedia packages are made available on many alternative repositories, often because of distributions restrictions on available codecs due to patents in some countries (mainly US for the moment).

Everything would be perfect in a wonderful world if package builders would contribute to official distributions, and multimedia editors chose only free codecs to promote their use worldwide ;-)... So try to stick to distributions deliveries?

Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives

Debian project ships kdenlive packages since "squeeze" (6.0) release, however kdenlive 0.8 (+mlt 0.7) is available only from "wheezy" (7.0), so it could be interesting to consider upgrading.

Ubuntu also offers kdenlive since "gutsy" (7.10), but you should upgrade to "oneiric" (11.10) to get release 0.8.

In both cases a simple apt-get install kdenlive should then work.

Fedora, RedHat and derivatives

RPM packages are available through unofficial RPM Fusion repository. Follow the site recommandations to make them available and end with yum install kdenlive

Gentoo, Arch, BSD ports

Building scripts are ready for 0.8 for up-to-date systems, so run respectively emerge kdenlive or pacman -S kdenlive or pkg_add kdenlive, etc.

Installing from source

If you want to test latest committed code or you personal patches, you will have to build kdenlive (and probably MLT) on your own.

You can use your distribution's package building procedure to use its software management system to install/upgrade/remove the binaries and data, and eventually share your builds (and even contribute to package maintainance - refer to respective distribution manual).

If you prefer you can build & install kdenlive to a local area (preferably not /usr, but rather /usr/local or $HOME/my_local_builds/kdenlive-last-release or so). It is then recommanded to use the build script.