LiVES is a video editing and VJ tool for Linux and BSD systems and today it celebrates its version 1.0 birthday. LiVES provides realtime video performance and non-linear editing for all classes of video editors and VJs (VJ is the Video equivalent of a DJ).
The LiVES project was started in 2002 by me, the author, and I continue to manage and enhance the project. At the time I had just bought a digital camera that was capable of taking short video clips of 10 seconds or so. Although I could play these clips perfectly well in mplayer, I was unable to find any editor on Linux which was capable of editing this format. So I thought – if I can play the clips, then I should be able to save the frames and edit them. I looked at the manpage for mplayer and noted that it could output multiple image files. From this the LiVES editor was born.
The other thing that was going on at the time, which is just as important today, was the beginning of DRM, and companies were attempting to lock down video and prevent people from copying and thus being able to edit clips. So I was interested in the new, open formats which were coming along as an alternative – today most people have heard of and even used ogg/theora. LiVES was one of the very first applications to support that format. True to the spirit of open source, the LiVES code does not contain any proprietary or patented codecs, although these can be added through external libraries. (continue reading…)
