84 LXF249May 2019 MMMay 201983DigaK8D
hotpicks
VidEOEditOr
POSiX-COMPAtiblEEnVirOnMEnt
Notsomany
featuresthatyou’ll
getlost,butallthe
essentialsinplace.on-linear video editors are now another
category of software in which Linux users can
enjoy plenty of freedom of choice. You might
haveheard of Kdenlive as the king of open source video
processors and Flowblade as its younger rival, but here
comes yet another software of that type, Olive. Sceptical
at first, we soon discovered that Olive fills its own niche
and looks attractive to a wider audience.
The project’s devs tried to find a balance between
simplicity and professional-level features, a goal that
is harder to achieve that it might seem. We took Olive
for a spin and tested it with a classic workflow example,
which implied merging a couple of video files together
with transition effects and adding a different sound
track over the top.
Olive is only in its alpha version period, and it lacks
a great variety of advanced features that exist in some
mature Adobe Premiere like rivals, but it’s simpler and
more robust software. We think it’s a great choice for
amateur users who are still undecided about what to
do with their home video libraries.
arely do we talk about (or to) Windows users,
but this time there is a perfect reason for doing
so. Many Linux switchers continue to use the
OSfromMicrosoft, either willingly or not, but the
existence of Cygwin is surely good news for them. It’s a
POSIX-compatible layer for basic GNU command-line
utilities, available as a open source addition for
Microsoft Windows.
The project has matured nicely since its initial
release in 1995, but even now when Windows 10 users
can run WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), Cygwin
has not lost its purpose. It supports a greater variety of
Windows versions, it has a smaller footprint and it does
just what it was supposed to do.
Cygwin brings the world of the Bash console to the
Windows desktop and spices it with lots of familiar GNU
utils such as ls, tar, awk, ssh and so on. It enables Linux
users to live the GNU-style life within Windows without
changing their habits and continue to administer
various things using a Bash shell. Cygwin is ideal for
running UNIX-style scripts in WIndows and automating
Olive
Cygwin
Olive sports a decidedly classic interface, with
project files in the top-left panel, media and sequence
players next to it and a gorgeous timeline area that
occupies the lower half of the Olive window. Behind the
scenes its uses the FFmpeg multimedia framework,
which defines the list of supported audio/video formats
and codecs.
When you feel you are done with your sequences,
tracks and transitions, select File > Export to encode
your work into any supported video format. Olive
provides very rich options for exporting. In a way, it can
even serve as a media converter, although FFmpeg is
famous for having plenty of other GUI frontends for that
purpose. The Olive project offers Snaps, Flatpaks,
Appimages and the PPA (ppa:olive-editor/olive-
editor), so it becomes super-easy to get it running with
almost no delay.routines in the same manner you can do it natively
on Linux. Compared to WSL, the main thing Cygwin
does not support is running Linux binary applications
natively, but that’s not required too often.
The Cygwin project has recently rolled out the third
major release of its brainchild. Cygwin 3.0 includes a
new mkdir that can create case-sensitive directories,
and also now has the chattr and lsattr utils for handling
advanced filesystem flags along with historic DOS file
attributes in Windows. Cygwin supports FAT, NTFS
and also exFAT filesystems.
There is no need to compile anything or prepare a
build environment on Windows in order to get Cygwin.
It comes with a nice graphical installer and takes all
hassles away from you, including setting the needed
environment variables and paths. After installation
you’ll be able to open Cygwin’s Bash console to do
your scripting and run GNU commands without leaving
Windows at all.Version: Alpha
Web: http://www.olivevideoeditor.org
Version: 3.0
If you’ve worked
with DosBox in
Linux, this is the
opposite of it.n
r