I recently talked about VLMC, or VideoLAN Movie Creator, a movie creator based on VLC, or VideoLAN Client, one of the better media players in existence.  I talked about how it might be the movie maker for Ubuntu Linux, you can read more about it here.  Since then, I have had a chance to test drive VLMC, in order to give you a review of it.  Keep in mind, this is just a preliminary review, many features, layouts, and bugs, will change.  If you want to install VLMC for yourself, be prepared, while it is certainly doable, be prepared, it’s not an easy thing to do, that is, unless you enjoy doing this sort of thing, or have already compiled VLC from source.  Also, it is possible that I may have just gotten a bad build of VLMC, as when code is in such a young stage, bugs come and go very rapidly, and this YouTube video obviously has not had the same problems with it that I had.

When you first search the VLMC website, you will notice that their is no download tab, this is because VLMC isn’t even in alpha yet, if you want it, you need to type the following command into GIT:

git clone git://github.com/VLMC/vlmc.git

Once downloaded, and you read the documentation, you’re told that you need to download and install VLC from the repository.  As I am running Ubuntu, and I installed VLC from the Ubuntu repositories, I downloaded the VLC source code.  I also ran an apt-get to get the build dependencies for VLC, unfortunately, there were quite a few new libraries that VLC started using, so build-dep didn’t get everything, leaving me to install about ten packages by hand.  Fortunately, they were still all in the Ubuntu repositories, so I didn’t have to go through true dependency hell.  After I finally had VLC compiled, I installed it, and it killed my current installation of VLC.   After changing the prefix to a few paths, I had VLC up and running, although I did have to re-install FFMPEG, Blender, PiTiVi, and several other packages.  Try to avoid installing AVUtils if you can avoid it.  Once I had VLC installed, compiling VLMC was incredibly easy, I just had to run:

qmake

make

and I had VLMC made and ready to go.

Once In VLMC, I was greeted by this splash screen.  Seamed nice enough.  Unfortunately, there were some major problems with this screen using the Ubuntu theme.  The fields where I entered text, were white, as the theme requested, unfortunately unlike the Ubuntu theme I was using, the text was also white, which made it rather difficult for me to enter anything.  Once I ran through the starting wizard (or clicked on the Cancel button), I was taken to the main screen.

I had a look around, and it seamed like a simple enough video editor.  But in order to use it, you needed to import some clips.   To do that, you can either click on the import button at the bottom, or you can import things from the file menu.

I would like to state how the import screen makes it easy to import multiple clips at the same time.  Also, you can cut down the clips to the size you want.  However, once I started importing clips, I started to run into my first major crashes.  The good news is that VLMC does, for the most part, a good job trying to catch your crashes.

So, even if the crash screen isn’t very helpful to the end user, you need to remember that this is still in pre-alpha, and is designed to help people debug their code.  When I clicked on OK, or Restart, the program would terminate.  The good news is that VLMC does an superb job recovering from crashes.  When you start up after a crash, even if you have restarted your computer, you will be prompted with a screen saying that VLMC has crashed, and that you can recover your project.  And I must say, VLMC will recover your project up to the moment that it has crashed.

After several trials, I finally got VLMC to play.  It does a very good job putting to videos together.  As you can see, it puts your imported clips in the panel at the bottom, you can drag and drop them into your timeline, at which point, it is fairly simple to move them about, play with the audio, and combine clips together.  Also, there is a nice history panel which you can refer to, and undo all of your decisions.  Just as a note, don’t try to import ogg video files.  While VLMC can play them, you will crash, and you will crash constantly.  You will only have a chance of getting your project to work if you use just the proper ffmpeg or avi codecs.

Once you’re done with all of your editing, you can export, or render, your movie.  VLMC provides a great panel to do this, it shows a loading bar, and a window which should show you what part of the video is being rendered.  I didn’t see any obvious way to set the codec though, however, this is likely to come with time.  Unfortunately, I never was able to get it to export, every time I tried, it would crash.  This was a large disappointment, as I was hoping to be able to use it to render the latest version of Code Bits, a show I do, which you can find on my Unctuous Video Channel.

Finally, I took a look around the preferences panel.  It seamed like it was organized well.  Again, this type of thing will likely change as VLMC approaches beta, but it still is nice to know that they are off to a good start.

All in all, I think VLMC shows great promise.  It seems like a good video editor, with a good design, made by the people who made VLC.  As such, I am very hopeful that this will be one of the best video editors on the market, not just the free market, but for the hobbiests who would pay a couple hundred dollars for a movie creator as well.  Because of this, I doubt that VLMC will be the media player for Ubuntu.  For the same reasons that Canonical took the GIMP out of Ubuntu, I think this will also not be included.  It will have too many features, and even though they are placed well, and are fairly intuitive to use, I think this will be a slightly more pro tool.  Also, in the time it takes the creators to make VLMC stable, PiTiVi will also become much more stable, and that media player will likely be the one that Canonical puts into Ubuntu, as it is more simplistic.

If I had to give VLMC a rating right now, I would give it 3/10, two of those three points because it was made by the creators of VLC.  It crashes too much, and is not very useful.  However, that is what the creators told me it’s current state was in.  That is why there is not even a simple download link on their webpage.  They currently only want developers to play with it at this time.  If they were to get out the bugs, and implement a good encoding framework, I would give is a 8/10, this is because it is just a standard simple video editor, and hasn’t blown my mind away.  With that being said, this video editor is still my dark horse, and I hope that it is finished soon.