I rarely need to do video editing and kdenlive is adequate for my needs. I used it successfully in Fedora (Gnome) about a year ago. I now have Fedora 41 installed on two computers and the video is so choppy that it’s almost impossible to edit it. Stranger still, it’s not a whole lot better in VLC. The file is an mp4, shot at 60 frames per second. Streaming video, such as from YouTube or Vimeo works fine.
The two computers should be more than adequate for handling that file. One is a desktop with 2 Xeon processors, 32 GB RAM, AMD dedicated graphics card with 4 GB VRAM. It’s 8 years old. The second computer is a new Lenovo Thinkpad with AMD Ryzen 7 Pro and integrated AMD (I believe a 780) graphics chip. This one also has 32 GB RAM.
I installed KDE Neon on a third computer, a 6-year-old laptop with an AMD A9 processor and AMD R5 graphics with just 8 GB RAM. The same video file worked perfectly in both VLC and Kdenlive on this much inferior laptop.
I tried installing KDE Neon on the Thinkpad, but it just wouldn’t boot up after installation (LiveUSB version worked fine). I also tried the KDE spin of Fedora 41 but encountered the same problem.
The desktop computer is a dual boot Windows 10/Fedora 41. I tried the video file in Kdenlive under Windows 10 and it worked fine there.
Clearly there’s a setting or a file that giving me problems in Fedora 41 (Gnome) and I’d love to fix this if possible.
I spent a fruitless hour trying to get my head around this without any sucess. I have the RPMFusion repositories enabled and tried following the directions on RPMFusion’s site (among other things from other sites, most of which were dead ends). The first thing they said to do was swap ffmpeg-free with ffmpeg from their repository. The command did nothing more than reinstall ffmpeg-free. I also followed the directions from Fedora’s site for installing multimedia codecs, but running that command said I already had all of them installed. I’m at a loss as to what else to do.
Okay, matter solved. In my back and forth trying to figure out what was going on, I eventually realized that the only rpmfusion respositories installed were for NVIDIA drivers or Steam. I got the other rpmfusion repositories installed and eventually remembered that my original attempt at swapping ffmpeg-free with ffmpeg was before I had the other rpmfusion repositories available. I repeated that command, restarted the computer, and tried the file in VLC with success. I then tried it in kdenlive, but still no joy. I found that I had the Fedora Flatpak version of kdenlive installed and it probably included the same inadequate ffmpeg-free. I deleted it and reinstalled from the rpm distribution and now kdenlive is working perfectly.
One has to wonder why, when we choose to install third-party repositories during installation of the OS why they only include the RPMFusion respositories for the NVIDIA and Steam repositories.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion. It finally got me on the right path.
I don’t all the details, but the Fedora Project has a policy do not deliver proprietary SW , except nVidia drivers (just to enable nVidia HW as it is very popular) and Steam for games, but even in this case you have to opt in during the install or later enable those two repos in Software explicitly.