Linux

I recently found out that it isn't too difficult getting my favourite racing game, Need for Speed III, to run with Wine.

My current installation is Slackware Linux 12.1 with Wine 1.0 from SlackBuilds.org. My system supports 3D acceleration, so I compiled Wine with OpenGL support (as is the default in the SlackBuild script).

1. Execute winecfg and set the Windows version to 98. Add your CD-ROM mountpoint to the list of drives in Wine. I used drive letter D.
2. Mount the Need for Speed CD-ROM or image.
3. Execute /SETUP/ENGLISH/SETUP.EXE, or choose Spanish if you prefer. Click through the setup options as you would normally. I chose the "full installation" option. There should be no errors during the copying of the files to your hard disk, if there is, try to copy the files manually. There may be an error like Could not get 'HardWareKey' value at the end of the installation, which can be ignored. At this point the game can be run by executing WINEDEBUG=+relay wine nfs3.exe -d3d0 from the directory to which the game was installed. This way the game will also use 3D acceleration, limited to a display size of 800x600. Note: executing wine nfs3.exe will result in the game complaining about corrupted files.
4. To get the game to use a display size of up to 1152x864, the file d3da.dll needs to be patched and renamed to voodoo2a.dll as is explained by Robert Schuster in the Wine AppDB. This will only work if you have the exact same version of the file. I've attached the full file at the bottom of this page to save you some trouble.
5. Now the game can be started using WINEDEBUG=+relay wine nfs3.exe -voodoo2. At this point I was able to play the game without major trouble, though it does tend to get stuck after finishing a race sometimes.

It shouldn't be necessary to write an installation guide for a Shuttle XPC since they are made to support Linux kernels. I got a SN68PTG5 (Glamor Series) model, which comes with an AMD processor and an NVidia card (GeForce 7050 PV / NVIDIA nForce 630a which has HDMI/DVI output), a SATA disk drive and plenty of memory. I'm writing this down here anyway to inform anyone who might be interested in buying it, that it works fine with Linux. I installed Slackware Linux 12.1 and a recompiled version of the default 2.6.24.5 kernel on it. I used the proprietary NVidia drivers, version 173.14.12.

At first I gave KDE 4.1 (Slackware packages by Robby Workman) a go. It looked really pretty, had some interesting new functionality, but I decided to skip it for now because a number of my favourite packages of KDE programs weren't available for KDE 4 yet. There were also a number of strange bugs, such as empty message dialogues (blame may lie with one of the following: the Slackware packages, the NVidia drivers or this KDE 4 release). I had hoped to use the new 3D effect enriched KDE 4 desktop, which worked for the most part. But as is known, some of the NVidia cards don't work well with KDE 4 at the moment. Other XPC models which contain Intel graphics cards probably function properly, since their drivers are released licensed as open source. The only thing I noticed was some occasional flickering of certain bars (those of minimised windows in the taskbar or WM buttons on the top-right corner of windows), but this was another factor which made me go with an alternative for now.

My alternative was the default KDE 3.5.9 release which comes with Slackware 12.1, enhanced with Compiz Fusion, which at the moment still outdoes KDE 4's 3D effects greatly. View a short demo below (flickering is only present in the recording).

So, you're a Linux user and you want to process some footage, be it of your mom's birthday or perhaps your own humble video project. You don't want to resort to Windows (or obviously a Mac for that matter) which are supposedly (and probably) easier platforms to edit video.

Give it a shot with your Linux system first. I've no experience capturing video from a digital camera yet, but that should be possible with Kino. I have a simple digital photo camera which can record videos in XVID/MP3 format, or so KDE tells me. I took some random shots with it over the years that I have all saved, so I figured I might experiment with these recordings for a bit, since I plan to do more video editing in the future to process old VHS tapes to digital storage.

Avidemux

The first program I tried was Avidemux. This program allowed me to cut up, stick together and apply certain visual changes to videos. One feature I needed Avidemux for was the altering of the frames per second. The first editing program that I used got into trouble when video samples had a frame rate that wasn't exactly 25 per second. Avidemux can also alter the image by adding filters. These filters can do things like resize the image, add colours to it, blur the image, sharpen the image, add scan lines to it, add subtitles or even add a whirl effect to the video. The most useful application of Avidemux is perhaps the possibility to convert a video to another video (and audio) format.

The Open Movie Editor

Another interesting program is the Open Movie Editor. This software is designed to be an editor rather than a conversion utility. It allows for quick and simple placing of video samples on a time line, while cutting them up or arranging them into a proper sequence. Audio tracks can be added in the same manner. Transitions between scenes (i.e. inserted video files or cut up samples) can be achieved very easily by letting two scenes overlap for a number of seconds. By doing this the overlap becomes visible in the timeline and when the video is played the one part of video is automatically faded into the other. I had some trouble finding an audio and video codec that would actually save the video sequence to a file that was properly readable. The probable cause of this is that I used a precompiled version and not too many codecs were installed or detected the right way by the Movie Editor.

Kdenlive

Because of this I tried another editor, named Kdenlive. I finally settled on this one because

1. it exports videos properly, providing many audio and video codecs
2. sports a couple of effects/ transition types by default
3. is a KDE application and is therefore graphically integrated and translated into Dutch (I like consistency)

The only disadvantage in my case was that for some yet unexplained reason Kdenlive would crash every now and then, but saving the project regularly takes care of that. This is probably again because of the fact that I used a pre-compiled version. I know it's not a good excuse but everyone deserves to be lazy every now and then. Usually I compile software myself, but because I'm now using Kubuntu on a laptop in stead of my usual Slackware set up this makes it very tempting to apt-get everything.

The results

I've uploaded two of my experiments to this website, so anyone reading this can admire or ignore the results of my video editing adventure. The first video shows some of the (very bad quality and out of focus) material which I recorded with my photo camera while moving, using transitions and some other effects. Eventually I used Kdenlive for this, but I achieved about the same using the Open Movie Editor.

The second one (also made with Kdenlive) is a recording of people walking down a shopping street. It's been slowed down, a "charcoal" effect has been applied to it, and the beginning and ending of the video demonstrate the blur effect.

I have probably missed out on a lot of alternatives, but these are the tools I've chosen to use for now, and Kdenlive does the job quite nicely. Finally I've taken some screenshots of the three programs that I tried: