Kdenlive/Manual/Installation

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Installation

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?

Most linux distributions provide recent binary packages of Kdenlive that can be installed from your Package Manager. However, in some cases you can find more recent versions in private repositories.

This page at the Kdenlive home has instructions on how to source these more recent versions, depending on which flavour of Linux you run. Instructions for Debian, Fedora Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu are available.

As of May 2015, obtaining and installing the latest version of Kdenlive has gotten a little complicated. Development of Kdenlive up to this point has used a technology known as KDE Frameworks 4. And the last stable release using this technology is version 0.9.10, released 25th September 2014.
To use this you need to have recent versions of frei0r, Kdenlive , mlt and libvidstab e.g.:

frei0r = 1.4.0+git20140826.72e51041
Kdenlive = 0.9.10
mlt = 0.9.3+git20141005.22abed67
libvidstab=2:0.98b

Development of Kdenlive has now switched to a new version of the KDE Frameworks called KF5 (KDE Frameworks 5). To install versions of Kdenlive using this underlying technology, you need to be on a Linux distribution which supports KF5. Ubuntu and its derivatives versioned 15.04 and higher support KF5. It is not possible to install KF5 on distributions earlier than 15.04 (except by chrooting your system). Versions using KF5 are distributed by the Kubuntu-CI Team. The sunab ppa (see below) does not distribute KF5 versions.
Version numbers of the KF5 flavour start at 15.04.0

The switch between 0.9.10 and 15.04.0 is quite major with respect to the development work required. Testing of the new 15.04.0 version has been limited. For critical work I would recommend not upgrading to 15.04.0 unless you have a good backout strategy — which might mean backing out of a distribution upgrade (not sure if you can run KDE Frameworks 4 on 15.4 Ubuntu distros).

Debian

Debian project has been shipping Kdenlive packages since the "squeeze" (6.0) release. However, to benefit from recent updates and bugfixes, you might consider upgrading to a "testing" release or even "sid".

Once your package managment tool is pointed at an appropriate release, a simple apt-get install kdenlive should then work.

Sunab's PPA (see below) is not recommended for Debian because Debian uses a different lib layout for multiarch (reference: this post from vpinon).

Ubuntu and derivatives

Ubuntu also has offered Kdenlive since "gutsy" (7.10). However, to benefit from recent updates and bugfixes, you should consider upgrading to the latest release.

Sunab offers a stable release of Kdenlive (KDE Frameworks 4 version) from this PPA.

Once your package managment tool is pointed at an appropriate release, a simple apt-get install kdenlive should then work.

Note that Sunab's PPA is built against the avconv multimedia libraries which Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Kubuntu et al. ship with. It is not built against the "alternative" ffmpeg multimedia libraries that other distros might have. So using this PPA for non-avconv-utilizing distributions might be problematic. (Thanks avconv/ffmpeg schism !!!!).

Fedora, RedHat and derivatives

RPM packages are not yet maintained in an official branch, so you must go through an unofficial repository such as RPM Fusion or packman. Follow the site's recommendations to make them available and end with yum install kdenlive.

Gentoo, Arch, BSD ports

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

Windows

There is no native Windows version of Kdenlive yet. However, you can use some virtualized Linux distribution to run Kdenlive on Windows. Some advice can be found on this page.

There is also the kdenlive on win project on SourceForge which "consists of an Ubuntu VirtualBox image that is preconfigured to run Kdenlive". The project was last updated 2012-08-09.

MacOS

Kdenlive and MLT can compile and run under Mac OS X. Packages are available from the MacPorts project.

MacPorts is a source-based system — there is not a binary app bundle for Kdenlive. Therefore, Kdenlive and all of its numerous dependencies, including multimedia libraries, KDE, and Qt, must be compiled. This can take a long time and much disk space! Furthermore, it is not unusual for something not to build correctly; it is definitely not something for the novice, impatient, or "faint of heart".

For more details see this.

You may have some success getting support for the MacPort of Kdenlive on the Mac Ports forum on MacOS Forge.

Installing from source

If you want to test latest committed code or your 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 maintenance - refer to the 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 similar). It is then recommended to use the build script ^[1] (Follow the instructions under "show kdenlive". These instructions will build Kdenlive and its dependancies [e.g. melt, ffmpeg] in a "sandbox").

Installing from Sunab's PPA

Olivier Banus (AKA Sunab) provides a personal package archive (PPA) of the latest development trees of Frei0r-plugins, MLT and Kdenlive. For details on how to install Kdenlive using this bleeding edge source see launchpad.net - kdenlive-git (unstable).Testing only!

Note: Sunab also maintains a PPA of the offical current release of Kdenlive (as noted above) as well as the current release minus one at ppa:sunab/kdenlive-release-old.

If you need to back out a release to the previous release then:

delete all packages (kdenlive, mlt, ...) from the kdenlive-release ppa (manually or with ppa-purge)
disable ppa:sunab/kdenlive-release in the package manager/software sources
enable the ppa:sunab/kdenlive-release-old in the package manager/software sources
install Kdenlive from ppa:sunab/kdenlive-release-old

Installing from daily builds

Dan Dennedy provides automatic daily builds that contain the latest git versions of Kdenlive, MLT, Frei0r, FFmpeg and some other important libraries. You can test this packages without changing your system. Just download the package and extract it to a folder of your choice. Inside that folder is a "start-kdenlive" executable that will start for you the latest Kdenlive.

Execute this by typing ./start-kdenlive in a terminal.

Daily builds are currently provided for Ubuntu (should be compatible with OpenSuse 12 and Debian 7) and Fedora.

See the daily builds rss feed which provides links to the builds for the above mentioned distributions.

Be sure to choose the correct download for your system.

kdenlive-fedora17-x86_64-YYYYMMDD.tar.bz2 is for 64bit Fedora
kdenlive-ubuntu12.04-x86_64-YYYYMMDD.tar.bz2 is for 64bit Ubuntu - (release 12.04 or higher) or other Debian based distros
kdenlive-ubuntu14.04-x86-YYYYMMDD.tar.bz2 (no 64 in the name ) is for 32bit Ubuntu - (release 14.04 or higher) or other Debian based distros

Daily builds are often an easy solution if you are having troubles with your instal and can be preferable to builing your own because you don't need to install a build environment (which can be problematic on old distro).

Daily builds are likely to work even if your distro doesn't match the reference ones, as these references are older (with ascendant compatibility libs) and the important libs are embedded - it normally works without problem.

The potential downside is that the daily builds are built from the unstable development stream and may contain bugs. On the plus side your daily build version and your main version of Kdenlive can live simultaneously on your machine.