Hi, I work for MSTV & use Ardour for editing audio in the cartoons created in Flash. When importing compatible formats of any videos in Ardour 3 the video loads fine, with exception to certain formats that have trouble which a video converter is used to work around those issues to get to the more favourable video format ardour plays nicer with, but the audio will not load at all from any videos even videos that normally load fine. This was all of a sudden.
Below I removed the username and replaced it with stars. ***
I get the following error message from Ardour:
[INFO]: LV2: Discovering 208 plugins
[INFO]: Loading menus from /etc/ardour3/ardour.menus
[INFO]: Loaded mixer bindings from /etc/ardour3/mixer.bindings
[INFO]: Loading bindings from /home//.config/ardour3/ardour.bindings
Loading 84 MIDI patches from /home//.config/ardour3/patchfiles:/usr/share/ardour3/patchfiles
[INFO]: Loading history from /home/***/jfdas/jfdas.history
[WARNING]: No ffprobe or ffmpeg executables could be found on this system.
Video import and export is not possible until you install those tools.
Ardour requires ffmpeg and ffprobe from ffmpeg.org - version 1.1 or newer.
Important: the files need to be installed in $PATH and named ffmpeg_harvid and ffprobe_harvid.
If you already have a suitable ffmpeg installation on your system, we recommend creating symbolic links from ffmpeg to ffmpeg_harvid and from ffprobe to ffprobe_harvid.
[WARNING]: No ffprobe or ffmpeg executables could be found on this system.
Video import and export is not possible until you install those tools.
Ardour requires ffmpeg and ffprobe from ffmpeg.org - version 1.1 or newer.
Important: the files need to be installed in $PATH and named ffmpeg_harvid and ffprobe_harvid.
If you already have a suitable ffmpeg installation on your system, we recommend creating symbolic links from ffmpeg to ffmpeg_harvid and from ffprobe to ffprobe_harvid.
ok from this warning message I do not understand what is wrong. I believe I have all these things installed. At least it shows in Ubuntu software center as installed. I also have no clue what $PATH is…
I am using Ubuntu 14.04
AS for now I just rip the audio out from another source and manually compile it together but it’s kind of a tiny extra step I hate to add in the long mix down process of video production. Other than that Ardour is a real boss for mixing audio in videos!
Ubuntu going off memory will actually NOT install ffmpeg when you request it by default. Instead it decides for you that what you REALLY want is avconv, which is not the same thing. It is a pet peeve of mine and I am struggling not to rip into this decision, yet again, so am going to say very little on that topic, other than to put it very simply and very much more “PC” than I would like, I really don’t agree with this decision.
Just in general, I can’t emphasise enough that the ‘distribution packages are always better’ maxim is something that I had let go when audio is concerned. To begin with, packages in distribution repositories are often older than upstream (true of all software but especially audio-related) and developers tend to get itchy flaming fingers when being asked about bugs fixed in the latest release.
At one time I refused to install anything that wasn’t packaged by my distribution, but then I realised that the ardour.org packages have a very nice ‘installer’ which does what you might expect from a generic packaging system, just tailored specifically to Ardour. As a somewhat relevant side note, it’s also very easy to work with LV2 plugins from anywhere and everywhere; simply drag and drop the binaries in your $HOME/.lv2 folder.
After finding all this out I was happy to dispense with out of date distribution packages and messy third-party repositories. Sticking to ‘upstream’ packages is generally what you want to do in the world of Linux audio, and most distributions have tools designed to help with compiling third-party software if necessary (apt-get build-dep and so forth) so you should feel free to mix things up and will probably have a smoother experience.
While GNU/linux distros in general pay great attention to critical packages (security, servers etc). Pro Audio tools are a niche and distro-packages are often untested and introduce subtle breakage. In particular the libav/ffmpeg
story greatly impacts professional audio/video production on general purpose desktop systems.
The “video tools warning” message is printed when Ardour starts (and certainly meaningful to packagers and some users familiar with GNU/Linux). We can conclude that the person who compiled and packaged ardour for your distro did not even test-run it!
Except for trying to communicate this to packagers, there’s nothing on our end that we can do to change this. The sources to all those tools are freely available and we even provide scripts to compile packages (using a debian/ubuntu toolchain).
Some audio-specific distros (AVLinux, KXStudio, etc) get this right. But if the distro you use does not deploy a system that works out of the box, you can either complain with them, step up and help them out, or don’t use the distro [packages] in question.
As a last note, all the binaries and tools from ardour.org will not interfere with distro packaging. They [install to /opt and hence] won’t mess with the system and can be installed in parallel.