Hi Paris,
Honesty compels me to report a bad linux problem, perhaps the worst I have ever had.
Recently, I upgraded all of my hard disks running Ubuntu versions of linux to Jaunty, which I like. Unfortunately, I did not test video editing before doing so, and when I went to make a substantial video the other day, I ran into real problems. I have been doing the editing of the mpeg files from my Everio camcorder in kdenlive, since it imports them easily, and it provides all of the titling and transitions I need. But, after rendering the final edit into am mpeg2, I could not turn it into a playable DVD. Hours of research with idvid, ffmpeg, tovid, etc., finally revealed that the mpegs produced by the current kdenlive rendering operation are defective when read by DeVeDe, dvdauthor, tovid, or whatever DVD authoring tool you try. Apparently the time codes are erratic, or possibly running backwards in places. (This does require a video of some length. Really short videos are still OK.) Of course it is possible to resample the mpeg that is rendered by kdenlive with ffmpeg as a solution, but when you are talking over 100,000 frames, it is a long, long solution. I re-installed Intrepid and used kdenlive etc., from its repositories, and the problem disappeared. I actually was using a later version of kdenlive and of ffmpeg with Intrepid on the disk that I overwrote, but clearly the problem lies in some failure of synch between the current versions of kdenlive, MLT, mencoder (and possibly some of the other packages involved). Fedora 11, which seems a very nice distribution, shows the same problem with video editing and it has more or less the identical video editing packages in its fusion repositories. QED. Thus, I will be editing back in Intrepid, or trying a switch to Cinnelerra in Jaunty to test its rendering engine (the problem with Cinnelerra is that you have to make your own titles in the Gimp, of some imaging software). I will let you know if I make any discoveries worth mentioning.
The web is full of people complaining about the current version of DeVeDe, but I did not find any discussions of any value -- just complaints. The complainers were not saying where their mpegs were coming from, but I suspect kdenlive, and maybe mencoder if they were transcoding raw files. There are also complaints about ffmpeg reporting on problem videos that the container frame rate is different from the codec frame rate. I think this is an ffmpeg artifact, since on the relevant files, there is no container, which seems not to be known by some of the discussants.
I thought I should mention this if it comes up in your contacts ....
Bob A