OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor
openshot.org519 points by metrofun 13 hours ago
519 points by metrofun 13 hours ago
I've supported OpenShot financially in the past, but I'm currently leaning towards LosslessCut and Shortcut.
Most people want a video editor to splice and concatenate video files without any loss or transcoding. I believe this behavior (lossless) should be default on all of these editors.
> Most people want a video editor to splice and concatenate video files without any loss or transcoding
You can do this with mpv. It's an open source cross platform media player.
For example, here's how I set up a tiny Lua script extension[0] to be able to visually cut videos in an intuitive way. It does it in seconds without re-rendering the video by shelling out to ffmpeg.
Years ago I did the same thing with a shell script CLI tool[1], but mpv's visual aspect makes it so much faster and easier to make clips out of a longer video.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/visually-create-video-clips-w...
[1]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-video-clips-with-ffmpe...
Nice hacks!
I made a similar script to extract clips from a source, possibly multiple files, and compress the result.
This is very cool! Do you have a similar workflow for stitching those cut clips together?
Thanks.
Not through mpv, but if all of the videos are the same resolution and codec you can use ffmpeg to concat them without needing to re-encode anything.
It could be worth making a little wrapper script for this, but the ffmpeg command itself isn't too crazy. You can Google for "ffmpeg concat multiple videos into a single video without re-encoding".
ffmpeg is super powerful, you can technically resize and alter videos into a consistent format and then encode a new video too.
You have to make a lot of sacrifices for lossless editing, so it’ll probably always be a specialized app or at least a separate tool within an all-purpose NLE. For instance, you’re limited to compatible input streams and you can only cut on specific intervals, depending on encoder settings etc.
I guess an NLE could import clips in a locked mode by default that only supports lossless operations, and you’d have to specifically enable the rest. Could be interesting.
Note on the specific intervals: that's where the clever optimization comes in: leave as-is (passthrough) all not affected sections of the video (basically everything) and only recode the tiny fraction that needs recoding due to the cut being set on a non-keyframe.
That one, I do believe should get more research and implementations. Currently I only know of LosslessCut's "Smart" mode, but I'd like to see other big players of the video editing space improving the state of the art in that direction for simple cuts.
I wonder, rather than re-encoding when starting on a B- or P- frame, could you preserve the entire GOP losslessly but make the earlier content "disappear" on playback by shifting PTS, or bundling several frames into a single frame's payload? Maybe it causes too many problems with players.
That's an idea that got some discussion but generally is strongly discouraged. Cutting must mean that the underlying bytes are absolutely not there in the final result, otherwise it will cause data leaks that users would very reasonably expect not to be there.
Imagine "smart cutting" a critically compromising part of a video (e.g. showing some personal info) only to later find out that the actual footage was still there, it just needed some timestamp shifting to unveil.
LosslessCut is great, but I've had issues with the final export like timing being off, having cut sequence etc. I think it is very particular about encoding/container.
Shotcut is my default video editor, if anyone's trying it on Linux please use their AppImage as it solved most of my headaches when I was using Flatpak version.
If it's lossless, it may change the cut position to enable lossless. If you want cut at an exact place, then all apps need to re-encode which will never be lossless.
For your particular requirement, you can't get lossless quality all the time by any software.
LosslessCut gives you the option to cut at the nearest keyframe, or to re-encode the small portion from the chosen timestamp to the next key frame (at most a few seconds). Sounds lossless enough to me.
For that kind of functionality, I would always recommend Avidemux[0]. It's quite a light package (which I like), and it allows you to do that and some other useful things too.
I absolutely love Avidemux but it doesn't preserve subtitles when removing a middle clip like lossless cut can.
Dunno if it’s just me, but I tried to download it the other day and couldn’t. The windows download link just punts you right back to their own site.
Sourceforge works
or Github https://github.com/mean00/avidemux2/releases/tag/2.8.1
Just checked. Same thing happened to me. For all links, including old versions AND other packages. Seems to be a problem with fosshub. (I am on linux+firefox).
There is also Blick which launched recently which claims to be very very fast https://blickeditor.com/?lang=en and part of recent wave of fast software (Task Slinger, File Pilot)
Neither open source nor free however.
You will save so much time and energy using the free/shareware DaVinci Resolve instead of OpenShot.
I have hope for OpenShot, but it's still not there.
The fact that they reimplemented everything from scratch doesn't give much confidence. The last thing I want to deal with in a video editor are bugs from code that's seen less real-world use, originating from who knows where.
Nice, looks like a great release. UI looks like it got a nice touch up and also cool to see that the project has AI powered object masking using onnx models: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-onnx.
It's good to see this is still under active development. Bit of self promo but I have worked on another interesting video editor called Shotstack Studio SDK.
https://github.com/shotstack/shotstack-studio-sdk
More for embedding a video editor into your own application but may be of interest for those who like Openshot.
(self promotion)
I've been working on OpenPost's Video Editor (Svelte-based video editor that runs on your (chromium) browser). If anyone's looking for something they can run on the browser, fully free and OSS as well, check it out https://app.openpost.social/video-editor
Currently really in early Beta but this seems like a great place to mention it.
Here is the repo if you want to give it a star
The "open-x" product name inflation - how did that happen
"open-x" for anything not actually OSS/FOSS should be banned.
Just like "engineer" is a reserved term in many jurisdictions, "open" should be too. At least in our industry.
If a bakery wants to call itself "open", so be it. But if software calls itself "open", it had better be open.
OpenAI, OpenRouter, OpenArt, OpenGov, OpenWeb, OpenText, ... this is all malarkey.
The only instance where "open" isn't trying to pose as open source is when it's a verb or adjective coupled with a noun used in a well-understood colloquial manner, eg. "OpenDoor", "OpenTable".
OpenAI implies open source AI. Look at how hard this "open" company tries to regulate open weights.
OpenRouter implies open source routing. Their platform isn't open source at all, and a lot of the specifics people will grow to care about are entirely proprietary.
Don't even get me started on OpenGov, which is a complete travesty.
These are such bold-faced lies.
Some governments do seem to take the OpenGov label to heart and make a good effort to have a good amount of their data be open to the public. However there definitely is a large majority who just latched on to the label they likely heard at a conference, and don't truly understand the concept. They just saw everyone else doing it and decided they need to hop on the bandwagon and throw a few cookies out to make it look like they followed course.
When AI was new, I definitely got fooled by "OpenAI" and thought it was an open source style AI company. Boy was I wrong there.
The straight abuse of language lately has become quite frustrating overall, but part of that gets political and I'll stray away from that to not get too off topic. When I see these words like "Open" used in the title so often, it just makes the word feel like it's tied to a new fad, and makes it harder for me to trust projects with those names.
Will have to give this a whirl with a screen reader, see how it does. Given the only somewhat working video editor accessibility-wise is currently Clipchamp, competition is sorely needed. Don't have high hopes, but I guess a x.0 release might be the time for me to start fixing it if nobody else is going to -.-
Related. Others?
OpenShot 3.0 Released – Stability, Performance, and Usability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33943790 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
OpenShot Video Editor – Free, Open and Award-Winning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31324136 - May 2022 (2 comments)
OpenShot 2.6.0 Released – AI and Computer Vision and Audio Effects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28324536 - Aug 2021 (16 comments)
OpenShot 2.5.0: Video Editing and Hardware Acceleration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336504 - Feb 2020 (4 comments)
OpenShot – Open-Source Video Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19725823 - April 2019 (88 comments)
OpenShot 2.4.1 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15689998 - Nov 2017 (10 comments)
OpenShot 2.0.6 (Public Beta) Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071014 - Feb 2016 (27 comments)
OpenShot Video Editor Achieves $35k on Kickstarter, Final Goal in Reach - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552289 - April 2013 (1 comment)
I am quite familiar with Resolve..I am not a pro, and it's probably totally overload for my purpose, but I think it's easy to learn and even quite intuitive
I tried many others, but mostly all others are not stable enough or have an even worse UI/UX... so I wonder... is this different?
I’m also not pro and just need an editor for Youtube or work. I think open source editors like Openshot and Kdenlive are generally underrated and easier to use than they used to be but even for just cutting together clips, adding text, and using keyframes it’s hard to beat how nice Resolve is.
Who knew a QT app could look this good? Congratulations on the release.
Why does open source software tend to lack quality / usable design?
I don't work on open source but it could be:
- Good design requires user interviews, which are less common in open source - The sorts of people who are most attracted to open source work are programmers, not designers - Open source software can get popular even with bad design; closed source software with bad design fails and shuts down
Designers have it really hard in free software because good design is about understanding the big picture, knowing what to leave out, have product vision to follow. That's tough to do in environment where goal is to make everyone happy and the biggest say have programmers who are developing the thing who are usually not interested in design, inexperienced in design or have their personal very specific product vision.
I think you definitely identified the issue well. Changing the design of an existing project, especially if you're not already involved in the project is a daunting task. You have to try and convince a core group of users that the design is going to be better to entice new users. But the problem is that those core group of developers likely don't care that the UI isn't up to par, and likely don't want it to change.
I even remember having this problem personally when trying to improve designs of webpages at my workplace. We had many of our technical users still using the command line for their mail, and even for browsing some webpages. Their whole workflow was stuck in the command line and they've been doing it that way for 20+ years. Trying to change things to improve the experience for others was like pulling teeth. They would retort the classic "Why change it? It works the way it is, no need to change it". Which to a degree I can understand. Some websites out there really do change their UI's for completely silly reasons and sometimes even lose functionality because of it.
At least this is one positive thing coming from AI driven development. People can actually make some pretty decent UI's without having to know as much about good UI design. AI can try to utilize the "best practice" standards and make a UI that often looks much better than most devs could make. There are some downsides of course, such as the fact that almost every new website nowadays looks the same, since Claude seems to have one style it always goes with. But maybe that tradeoff is okay.
I have seen enough atrocious proprietary UOs that I am not convinced your underlying thesis is correct.
I tried openshot, shotcut and kdenlive. They all felt rather cheap. Flowblade was a nice surprise tho.
My goto has been Shotcut, it's main advantage is high resolution support without having to pay extra compared to something like Lightworks (which has a better UI for sure, but I'm not paying...).
This is one of those occasions where a video would be appropriate.
They have videos for 3.0, 3.3 and 3.4, maybe check back on their channel in a few days or weeks: https://www.youtube.com/@OpenShotOfficial/videos
How far is blender off this nowadays?
AFAIK out of "Record, Edit, and Color", Blender mostly excels at the editing part of video editing. There is no recording at all, and coloring you'd do via the "Post Processing" which can be via nodes or "standard". Coloring is alright, although far cry from Resolve.
If you're already used to the Blender shortcuts though, editing video is a breeze and everything just works as expected, which is really nice. But I wouldn't pick up Blender and its shortcuts just to edit video, then I'd probably go with something more fully meant for video editing.
- ...but is the video encoding fast? - Does it often break while encoding?
That was my experience some years ago and I decided I will skip a decade to see it all working.
Since the announcement is, frustratingly, low on details, did they implement the usual hue vs hue, hue vs sat, etc. controls? I don't do much color grading but my line of work requires using multiple cameras, thus I enjoy using a color chart to match the video clips. With a vectorscope and with the color chart I could quickly do basically everthing I need with this software instead of relying in Resolve, if only it offered those controls
Just check the documentation: https://zh.openshot.org/files/user-guide/color.html
In general, DaVinci Resolve on Linux desktops handles Dlog/HDR camera and drone LUTs like a champ (KDE plasma handles HDR10.) When they run the budget speed-editor promos you get the studio license card for free. If you needed gyroflow because your cameraman has a thorazine stomp, there are few completely FOSS options around.
For old or no GPU, there are a few other options:
OpenShot is simple, Shotcut works everywhere, and https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/en can handle >4k footage for free.
Depends how much time you have to dig through manuals. =3
Is this a bot reply?
Just a hobby filled with a lot of anecdotal nonsense on the web.
If you fly a platform that stores D-log M video and RAW images... there are very few FOSS options to share great looking content. =3
Is this effectively a leaner more basic, record, cut, colour version of Resolve?
Blackmagicdesign corporation's Davinci Resolve doesn't run on most OSes. So I can't tell you. But I can tell you that openshot allows me to edit videos quickly on linux. I like it.
When you say doesn't run on most OSes, which are you referring to? I'm just curious, as Davinci Resolve runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
The caption editing workflow has been a pain point for years. I'm surprised they didn't fix it in a major release.
A Video editor landing pages with still screenshots doesn't do any justice for new comer. The power can only be shown with smal 10-30s in-inline videos.
Adtech cookie banner on a .org domain for a thing whose name starts with „Open“? No thanks. Won‘t look further.
Your loss then. Although I prefer KDEnlive, OpenShot is not a bad video editor.
And I don't think it's a terrible thing for an open source developer to try to earn a few coins.
Its name starts with Open because it's open-source / free software (GNU GPLv3).
FWIW you can just install it from your distro's software repos or as a flatpak[1] and never ever visit the official website.
Oh come on, they only have 210 "partners" they give your data to!
You jest, but with even trivial sites having 900+ so-called partners, "only" does indeed seem apt.
I know, but we're talking about some free & open-source software funded by donations, not a for-profit company.
Funnily enough their not (fully) free and not open source competitor DaVinci Resolve doesn't have a cookie banner and doesn't set any cookies on your browser.
I feel like the only way to have this many "partners" as is to inherit them, at least if you're 'trivial'. Like, they probably chose some ad or tracking script that has so many partners.
If it had VST support I could use it instead of DaVinci Resolve.
If you publish to platforms like YT, DaVinci Resolve can actually prepare your audio so it remains intact during their compression shenanigans.
I don't know of any FOSS programs that can automatically handle it cleanly. =3
Looks good!
I decided to have a quick, cursory, "first-glance" look at OpenShot's software architecture...
It apparently (and again, someone correct me if I am wrong here) uses FFmpeg (https://www.ffmpeg.org/ https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg), more specifically the FFmpeg libraries (libavutil, libavcodec, libavformat, libavdevice, libavfilter, libswscale, libswresample).
Nothing wrong with that, countless video and video-related programs, most notably VLC -- use FFmpeg as their base software layer.
LibAv (https://github.com/libav/libav), a fork of FFmpeg, can also apparently be "swapped in" as the base layer, replacing FFmpeg if so desired.
FFmpeg/LibAv are written in C, primarily adhering to the C99 standard.
From there, building on top of that, we have libopenshot (https://github.com/OpenShot/libopenshot) which is a C++ "middle level" library generating/abstracting a higher-level API for video editing specifically, and containing bindings to C++, but perhaps more notably, additionally to Python and Ruby...
Then on top of that, we finally have OpenShot (more specifically 'openshot-qt': https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt) which is written entirely in Python 3.x, which uses PyQt (which bind to Qt libraries which give the software its platform independence!).
And of course, there are some other libraries and repos for other things here: https://github.com/OpenShot, for example, libopenshot-audio for audio, etc.
Opinion: Let me start off by saying that I am NOT a Python guy! I'd rather program in Delphi/ObjectPascal, C, C++, x86 Assembler, Java, Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Clojure, Haskell, R, Odin, Zig, or, if someone put a gun to my head, JavaScript (without Typescript!) or Rust! (too large a compiler, too many imported dependencies in many libraries/crates -- the language itself I have nothing against!)
But, that being said (also, I'll say I've seen some truly great programs written in Rust, before the community tars and feathers me!), I have seen just how powerful a teaching tool for programming tool Python is!
This is not a simple Python "Hello World" program!
This program is powerful, quite powerful indeed!
It showcases what Python can do by coordinating and managing lower-level functionalities!
It's also an excellent program from the perspective of garnering GitHub community support (think about it, the barrier to "chip in" and offer help/assistance/bug fixes/functionality improvements is lower, way lower on a Python program than it is on say, a C++ program using all of the latest C++23 language features or on a LISP-derived language using many deep asymmetric recursive meta constructs...)
It's also a great example of a Python cross-platform program!
And I really like the way that the software is delivered in discrete layers, i.e., the C++ middle layer has its own dedicated GitHub repo (as opposed to being co-mingled with the Python higher level one), etc.
So, great job!
This is truly a Python exemplar program!
Some really good Software Engineering practices in this one!
I have dream that Oneday Oneday these surpass Cinelerra, written in 1996. Thirty Years Ago.
It is not like Cinerella's current release is thirty years old though. You are talking thirty years of development.
Not to be confused with OpenCut, which is a completely different FLOSS video editor.
any interest in adding agentic capabilities?
The major design companies have this to supplant their theoretically now less attractive SaaS revenue, letting professionals automate most things through their creative suite products with LLMs doing a lot of reasoning about what to do and how to composite, but it all goes through cloud compute instances and they basically won’t add a local server to their products because they cant charge per credit. So that retains a bottleneck on uploading and file sizes and other things
If Openshot started competing in that regard it would be very forward looking. I wouldnt even say competitive yet because people dont really know about this use of AI and associate AI creativity with generative only, instead of just replicating the human processes for mass output faster
The cookie banner and the list of 209 adtech vendors they share user data with is so repulsive.
Try AdGuard DNS or an adblocker. I didn't see any ads on the site.
I have an adblocker. You don't see the cookie banner because you're likely outside the EU and your data is silently being shared with the aforementioned adtech vendors. The EU requires "informed consent" for this within their jurisdiction, hence the cookie banner.
nice
[flagged]
So it runs on ?
I really wish all s/w had the platform and price in line 1.
Their homepage features a download button, with all the platforms listed, as the first thing when you open it.
Ok, all the usuals.
TBF, it is on their home screen, https://www.openshot.org/download/
Has anyone tried having a local agent (like Qwen) use this? I wonder how good the API is for programmatic / CLI usage.
That was the first question that popped into my head as well. We’re now in the age of “AI all the things,” so it seems like every app needs an API or CLI of some sort. Everything needs to be machine accessible.
shouldn't we focus on human accessibility first? it also makes things more "machine accessible" as a byproduct, but at least humans remain the main focus
also, openshot is foss. can't you just give the source code to your clanker and let it mod itself in the app?
> shouldn't we focus on human accessibility first?
This is the big question for designers, how much of the future of software will be human-oriented UIs vs a human typing into a chat window (or as a temporary bridge, telling an agent to operate existing GUIs).
For now I believe agent-driven software is still pretty niche, something for highly technical users, but that will change as it mainstreams. Early adopters demand early adopter software features.
a chat window is actually HORRIBLE for many tasks. i really strongly hope this isn't what the future of software looks like
there is just no way a chat interface could replace a non-linear video editor gui
> a chat window is actually HORRIBLE for many tasks. i really strongly hope this isn't what the future of software looks like
I strongly concur - I don't want to "tell" the app to level the audio between several clips only to have it level everything to 0 and then take five minutes to undo etc
Yes we should. Still UI is for telling the software to do meaningful work. Which means that every well designed UI software will have ready to expose api lurking just benath the surface.
I would love OpenShot to update their website. It's not; it's just for me. The current design makes me not use this software. I would love to help make new website for them.
That seems excellent.
I wonder if they finally change the caption editing with the weird timing reference, probably not.
edit: this is what I'm talking about: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenShot/comments/1s27wre/the_way_c...
edit: can't really try as it crashes on my M1 Sequoia (maybe the install being named OpenShot-v4.0.0-x86_64.dmg was not a good sign ;))
How does this compare to After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Davinci Resolve?
I am pretty sure, this thing solves half of the problems the above solve, and it does it half-good.
I am pretty sure you haven't tried it yourself. I am also pretty sure the software you mention is significantly more expensive or at least not open source.
Which makes me pretty sure yours was a useless comment.
I have tried the ones I have mentioned, and I hadn't tried this one, - which is precisely why I am asking!
No need for snarky "but ours is foss smugface" comments.
Not to say, your comment make me pretty sure you hadn't tried either of mentioned by me, and does not take video editing seriously.
I use and pay for DaVinci Resolve Studio on Linux myself, so yes I have tried them and yes, they're obviously more feature packed and polished than OpenShot is.
OpenShot is however significantly easier to use and does what you need for casual editing. If you want a step above that and still FLOSS then Kdenlive is a better choice.
What makes your original comment useless is that it reads like an American saying, 'I bet our GDP is bigger than Nauru's' - like what is the point? You know the answer already. An open source video editor is unlikely to be as good as DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci has multiplicity of the resources OpenShot/Kdenlive etc. do.
So again, what is your point?
At least we can agree in our mutual disdain towards american way of thinking *shaking hands*
I can’t help but laugh at this, it’s like a comedy skit with two people with different European accents accusing each other of being American.
We need an attestation platform so you can prove non-american-ness.
Cheers from Canada
Meanwhile, the brightest engineer they know left to work for a startup in San Francisco.
Oh no! He took some bad peptides at a party and now has $500k in medical fees
I've had great experienced with it. It's almost certainly not as full-featered as premiere pro, but it runs buttery smooth and robust, while Premiere Pro kept crashing frequently and was a bit tedious to use for simple tasks.
It's FLOSS (GPLv3). There are very few free software video editors. Another good one is kdenlive, which a few years back I liked better that OpenShot.
Kdenlive has improved remarkably over the last few years and in many ways not in a way you'd visibly notice, they had a period where it was very unstable/crash prone so they spent a good chunk of time really focusing just on that and as a result it's now incredibly stable, I can't remember the last time it crashed.
For basic video editing it's quite user friendly and you can do some fairly prosumer level things with it (it's not going to match a studio grade NLE but for most people it doesn't need to).
This does not answer my question, I need something that can do thing, not how it is licensed. I have used Kdenlive, and it's nowhere near either of these functionality-wise, and struggles with big files.
After Adobe's licensing/subscription shenanigans, I would have expected the license to be more salient in folks' minds.
Unlikely to be near that polish and feature completeness. If you ask "then what's the point?", for now the answer is the license and the source availability.
I've asked "how it compares", not "what's the point" -__-
Honestly, it sounds like you’re going to end up asking a ton of very specific functionality questions that Da Vinci Resolve and co do in their own ways.
Does OpenShot? For your specific use cases? I dunno, but it’s free, so give it half an hour or an hour and see? You’ll get more info than from many of us that probably don’t use this kind of software often.
And then you can report back your findings! :D
You'll not get any sense from open source abdolutionists. Your question will not compute.
"I have a long list of wants, and I require someone else who can't even see that list to tell me how this scores, because I can't be arsed."
> I am pretty sure, this thing solves half of the problems the above solve, and it does it half-good.
What makes you pretty sure?
With enough time, love and leadership direction, any art-focused OSS can be the next Blender or Krita :)
"how does this small open source tool developed from the good will of developers in their free time compare to the juggernauts of the fields, with millions in revenues ?"
You know it very well, why do you pretend to ask ?