LiVES is a simple to use, yet powerful video editor and VJ tool. It allows you to combine realtime and rendered effects, streams and multiple video/audio files, and then encode to over 50 formats.
LiVES is aimed at the digital video artist who wants to create their own content, the video editor who wants to create professional looking video, and the VJ who wants to captivate with spectacular images. The list of features is quite long. The most important things:
- Fully cross platform for Linux and many flavours of Unix (e.g. BSD, openMosix, IRIX, OSX/Darwin).
- Loading and editing of most video formats (via mplayer decoder).
- Smooth playback at variable frame rates, forward and in reverse. Display framerate can be controlled independantly of playback framerate.
- Streaming input and output.
- Ability to edit many filetypes and sources including remotely located files (with mplayer/ffmpeg libraries), and directories of images.
- Encode to any of the 50+ output formats which are now supported (e.g. mjpeg, mpeg4, mpeg1/2, VCD, SVCD, DVD, ogg/mp4 ogm, Matroska mkv, dv, swf, Ogg Theora, Dirac, MNG, Snow, xvid, and even animated GIF and PDF!)
- Encoder formats can be extended through the encoder plugin API.
- Can load mp3, ogg, mod, xm and wav files.
- LiVES can also load tracks directly off CD to use with your video (using cdda2wav).
- Many effects, including random/targeted zooming, panning of video, colour cycling and colorisation/colour filtering.
- Real time previews as the effect is processing.
- Multitrack window with drag and drop
- Support for an almost limitless number of tracks and effects
- Full crash recovery.
- Simple and intuitive menu layout.
- Jack audio support
LiVES runs in Linux, and it uses GTK+ 2.8 libraries. Several built in themes/skins are available (see screenshots). Several other applications and packages are required – mplayer 0.90rc1+ compiled with jpeg/png support, ImageMagick 5, PERL 5, libjpeg62, gdk-pixbuf-loaders, sox.
