Software Update: OpenShot Video Editor 2.4.4

Version 2.4.4 of OpenShot Video Editor has become available. OpenShot Video Editor is an open source video editor for Linux and is also available for Windows and macOS since version 2.0. The program is made with Python, GTK and the MLT Framework, and is comparable to Windows Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie. The main improvements made in this release are listed below.

Keyframe Scaling

This is perhaps one of the best bug fixes included in this release. Keyframes contain actual frame numbers and their values, and thus, switching to different frame rates and/or exporting to different frame rates, has many unexpected consequences, such as every single keyframe coming too early or too late. This is now fixed, so keyframes and animations are correctly scaled when changing frame rates!

Timeline & Preview Performance

Stability and performance are extremely important for OpenShot, and historically have been our greatest technical challenge. As usual, lots of improvements have been made in this area. Some of the stand-out improvements include: special handling for certain audio files to better handle the 1-frame video track, updated Angular and timeline speed improvements, improvements to image caching, and improved “missing frame” logic which helps prevent freezes while searching for a frame which will never come.

Improved SVG Rendering

OpenShot is now compatible with resvg, an amazing SVG rendering library. A big thanks to RazrFalcon for helping us with the integration! This improves our SVG overlay and title rendering, supporting much more of the SVG standard. The resvg library is included with our official downloads and installers, but might take much longer to reach official Linux repositories (since resvg is not available in many repos). Hopefully the integration with OpenShot will help resvg move in that direction.

Improved Docking & Tracks

One of the most significant updates to docking is the new full size properties widget, which can be on the left or right side of OpenShot. This displays more information without scrolling as much, and is very useful when editing or animating. A big thanks to Frank Dana (ferdnyc) on making this a reality. Also, many improvements have been made when inserting a new track, which makes it extremely fast even on huge projects, and easy to “undo” if needed. Also, many bug fixes relating to “Track Name” are included, and custom named tracks are supported on all dialogs.

Improved Windows Installer

If you have previously experienced issues launching OpenShot on Windows, we have created a new wiki article with troubleshooting steps. In addition, our Windows installer now looks for conflicting DLLs, and renames them during install, and should resolve a great number of issues. These conflicting DLLs are being added to System32 by some unknown 3rd party software (which should never be done), and are superseding the ones included with OpenShot. This can also be easily reversed (since we just rename the files). However, in general, our new Windows installer should help a bunch of people who previously could not launch OpenShot.

Relative File Paths

Once a project file (*.osp) is saved in version 2.4.4, some magic happens. All file paths are converted into relative paths, even paths contained in the undo/redo history, thumbnail paths, file paths, and any other paths found in the project data. Upon re-opening your project, all paths are once again converted into absolute file paths. This allows a project folder to be completely portable, and can be moved on the same machine, can be moved to another machine, and even another operating system… and will still open just fine! This “kind of” worked before, but should now work excellent and with great stability.

User Defined Export Presets

Have a favorite export preset that is not included in OpenShot by default? No problem. Just create a text file in the /users/USER/.openshot_qt/presets/ folder. You can copy one of our existing presets to get you started. Next time you launch OpenShot and open the Export dialog, you will see your custom preset listed.

New Languages: Hindi, Arabic, Chinese

For many years I have dreamed of including full Hindi, Arabicand Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) support in both OpenShot and openshot.org. I was finally able to help fund this effort, to help out the OpenShot translator community, and help get us to 100% complete translations in all 3 of these languages. I am very proud of this, and hopefully this effort will help engage people from these languages, and introduce OpenShot to a whole new world of people!

Constant Rate Factor Support (CRF)

We have added support for constant rate factor, which required some refactoring of libopenshot::FFmpegWriter. A big thanks to Peter (you are the best)! This can be utilized in any export preset, and is currently used by our VP9 preset.

Integrated Change Log

Do you ever wonder what changes are included in your currently installed version of OpenShot? Now you can find out! Use the Help->About OpenShot->Changelog dialog, and you can quickly see what commits, the date of each commit, and you can even right click and view the GitHub commit information. I know I might be the only person excited by this, but yay!

Waveform Improvements

When splitting clips which displayed waveforms, the newly split clip would no longer display any waveform data. This has been a long time bug report, and is finally fixed in this release! Thanks to everyone for patience on this one, and I’m glad that it’s finally resolved.

Improved Release Testing

One of my goals for 2019 is to make the development process for OpenShot as transparent as possible, and document absolutely every detail of OpenShot’s release cycle, release testing, and release flow. Included in this documentation is a completely new process for testing OpenShot before a release. Instead of this task being done primarily by myself, I’m hoping that this more transparent and documented approach will allow other contributors to fully test OpenShot and help me out in this area. And for the record, I successfully completed the new release testing process for all 3 OSes (Linux, Mac, and Windows). I actually found many issues while working through the testing plan and resolved them all prior to release. It felt great to actually see the validation of why a more rigorous testing plan is necessary.

New User Community

Over the past few months, our long-time user community / forum ( died. Where can a new user ask questions? Where can users have rich discussions on problems, requested features, work-arounds, ideas, etc…? Introducing the official OpenShot subreddit: So, please join the community, help answer questions, and hang out with us OpenShot people!

Full Time Development

After giving more than 10 years of my life to this project and this community, I am finally working full-time on OpenShot. I had only dreamed of OpenShot becoming a full-time career, but I am so incredibly humbled and honored that OpenShot continues to grow, improve, and that I have scratched together enough money to work on this full-time! Hold on tight, because 2019 is going to be the most significant one yet for OpenShot!