I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into “smaller” instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can’t remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
Blender for video editing. I haven’t even touched its 3D animation features.
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
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Last time I tried blender for video editing, the experience wasn’t great. Has it changed significantly in the last couple of years?
I tried out in the late 2000s, and it was clunky and limited.
I tried it again in 2020, and it is completely different. Super powerful and polished.
Yes. 100%
No clue about video editing though.
Also, why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
Do you have recommended alternatives? I like it using Blender for video editing because I can automate any arbitrary repetitive task with a Python script.
I have enjoyed Kdenlive on the rare occasions I need to edit something. Haven’t used Blender to compare, and I’m not sure about scripting. But for casual stuff it’s solid.
I second Kdenlive.
Not too familiar with it, but what I do know is that it is an incredible video editor.
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Yes! the video sequencer has received dramatic improvements over the past years. It now shuffles or overwrites timeline content when you move a strip over another (based on a user setting), it transform-snaps to strip bounds and other elements, it auto-generates proxies so you never have to touch anything, it plays in realtime… for a full overview of improvements see the release notes : https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes
Holy shit, I didn’t know that that’s a feature. For the two times a year I need to edit videos I will never have to deal with shitty free versions/test versions of video editing software ever.
Blender does an insane amount of things. 3d modelling, image editing, sculpting, rendering, procedural texturing, procedural modelling, video editing, physics simulations, animation, rigging, mocap. Probably some other things that I’m forgetting too.
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I’ve heard really good things about Shotcut. I wonder how the two (and Kdenlive as well as commercial competitors) compare. I looked a while ago for some good comparison articles but don’t recall finding any.
Shotcut crashes unexpectedly, on all the machines I’ve tried it on. Not frequently though, & it was so good I used it anyway.
Yikes, sorry to hear that. I only learned about Shotcut here on Lemmy. You can see my exchange with someone who uses it for work on this post.
If you want to only edit video you can use kdenlive. I tried blender several month ago and it still lacks lots of feature and exporting time is higher than kdenlive, even though they both use ffmpeg inside btw kdenlive let me write my own exporting script