![]() What they sell as closed are some proprietary codecs they just aren't in a position to open themselves (because they don't own them and they are industry standards). What a bunch of narrow minded fellows around here.įirst of all, Lightworks IS open source. If Lightworks ends up being open-sourced as a result, so much the better, but this disentangling of the code base is a necessary first step to supporting multiple platforms and they are to be commended for taking it. Having been through these wars since the late 70s, I have seen "the better is the enemy of the good" snatch defeat from the jaws of victory more than once and understanding the real dynamics of adoption is critical. The net result is that more software that pays the bills is available on more platforms, and that makes those platforms more able to pay the bills and hence get adopted. And as indicated in the article, the developers get the added benefit of revisiting old design decisions which no longer require the same compromises as when made a decade ago. By providing powerful, world-class software on as well as Windoze, the list of show-stopper complaints gets just that much shorter. The most common successful countermeasure to adopting open platforms is " doesn't exist on " and that ends the conversation. Software doesn't have to be open-source to aid and abet the transition from Windoze to other platforms. ![]() Additionally, because we went through the process of splitting the code into OS dependent and independent pieces, we've ended up with a cleaner, more maintainable codebase which will benefit all of our future development across all platforms. Now, if you run the two versions side by side, it's extremely difficult to tell them apart, so in that sense, I'm very pleased with the results. The initial goal with the Linux version was to try to make it as similar to the Windows version as possible. In particular, updating video/playback images from a non-ui thread was a real challenge, and for a while I wasn't sure it was even possible, but after much head scratching, we found a solution that worked. The multi-threaded nature of the Lightworks software made some of the OpenGL support difficult to write. Linux of course doesn't have Direct3D, so we had to reimplement all the Linux GPU specific code using OpenGL. In order to get the very best performance, Lightworks' Windows layer uses Direct3D for all the video scaling, effects, and colour-space conversion. What was the hardest thing about porting to Linux? The bulk of the work in porting to Linux was actually in re-engineering the existing code, not in writing the Linux-specific layer. The OS independent code accounts for about 97% of the total codebase. What percentage of the code is now OS independent? editing, play-engine, etc) which uses the OS dependent code (eg. In essence, the Lightworks code is now split in two-the OS independent code (eg. Once this was complete, we were then able to begin work on a Linux implementation of that same layer. Instead, we decided to move it to a new operating system dependent layer which we engineered to have an OS independent interface. Our solution was to avoid rewriting the Windows-specific code at all (it was, after all, tried, tested and optimized). How do you keep shipping Windows builds whilst the work is underway?.How do you rewrite that much code in a sensible timeframe.When we started the move to make it cross-platform 18 months ago, we were faced with a number of challenges, including: The Lightworks codebase is quite large-close to a million lines of code altogether-and some of it has been in existence for nearly twenty years. When did you decide to make the majority of Lightworks' code OS independent and what was your approach to doing this? It remains a no-cost option for cross-platform video editing, but for open source video editing options, read our state of video editing report. Lead Developer Rob Fearnside answered questions from Red Shark News about how it got to this stage.Įditor's note: The intent for Lightworks to go open source seems to have been abandoned. Lightworks, a high-end non-linear video editor, was approaching its public testing phase for its Linux release.
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