In this interview with Edward Hervey, the PiTiVi maintainer, GNOMEDesktop.org talks about the history of the project, its current status, and plans going forward. PiTiVi aims at being the premier open source video editing solution and with current developments that seems to be within reach.
.. he knows little about software patents, otherwise he wouldn’t claim things like: “being the only Free editor not tied to any patent-encumbered libraries ! “.
Has he checked all 400000+ software patents?
Software patents are landmines so nobody can be 100% sure but that’s a pointless argument and everybody focuses on patent aggression instead. Nobody can claim for sure there aren’t pink unicorns either but there has been enough checks on the Ogg codecs and others by Xiph.org and Mozilla Foundation to be reasonably sure that they aren’t patent encumbered and hence Linux distributions and even Microsoft (ogg vorbis, not theora) uses them in various places.
He can’t be sure, but the fact that gstreamer is not specifically tied to a set of multimedia codecs means that if a codec is encumbered by patents, that specific codec will not bring the house down.
People can use encumbered codecs and the like with pitivi, but they are not limited to them and can avoid them if they want to.
As for someone holding patents on interfaces and the like, that is a different matter.
This tool could be quite useful, especially since it can be batched from the command line without needing the UI. I hope the work on this continues to a point that it rivals commercial offerings
one of the best non-linar video editing tool – kdenlive
do check it out if you are serious about video editing 🙂