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Everyone is familiar with Open Office’s office suite or Firefox/Mozzilla’s internet suite of Firefox and Thunderbird. Both suites have found homes in Linux and are a staple in many Linux distros. (IMHO) These two application suites have made Linux a viable OS in desktop computing. Yes, I do know other alternatives to OOO and FF are available and, competition is a good thing.
The time has now come for another Application Suite for the OSS community. Lets face it, Linux lacks many of the creative and multi-media tools that needs to be a real desktop OS. Many new users to Linux just need a simple way to edit video, audio and pics. I know that many apps already exist for these needs but, most of these apps fall short (IMHO). Is there a really solid OSS video editor for the home video enthusiast? This is what I see with many OSS video editors: Cinelerra is overkill and it lacks the ability to capture DV video. Kino and Diva are just to basic. Pitivi just combines clips, Kdenlive is still very buggy (in beta) also, getting firewire to work is also a real pain for video editing applications too.
A simple to use video editor is much needed in the home user Linux desktop. While were talking about video Apps how about integrating a video editor with a DVD Video creation app? Is this starting to sound like iMovie and iDVD?
Audio Editing is in much better shape for Linux than video editing but it too still lacks the polish and simplicity that many home users need for audio editing. Audacity is a great app but it lacks looping, midi, music notation tools and RSS feed generation for podcasting. Ardour on the other hand is just over kill for new Linux user and is to advanced for an easy to use audio editor. Does what I’ve just describe sound like Soundtrack? It might also be nice if the Audio editor worked with the video editing and DVD apps as well, so that files could be transfered back and forth between the apps.
Image editing in Linux needs work too, Gimp is OK for simple editing but should combine a photo manager and needs some work with some of the core tools and its UI to make it easer for the home user. Once more, the Image app should be able to work with the video editing and DVD creation software.
If these apps were created and worked well, a natural side effect could be a push in the use of free or Open source formats for media such as ogg. Having a multimedia application suite for creation that pushes ODF for multimedia would be huge in the multimedia world.
So the BIG question is how do you make money off developing this Application suite? Easy, all of these apps create multimedia files that either have hard copy equivalents or can be uploaded to sharing sites like youtube or flicker.
The video that the video editor app makes could have an option to upload the video to youtube, break, metacfe, or any other video sharing site. This option would be put out to bid for the sharing sites to bid on for the upload option to be the defalut with their site.
Firefox did this with the default home page set to Google. Google pays Fire fox almost 40 million dollars a year for its spot as the home page default in Fire fox. By setting a default upload to a sharing site this will drive visitors to that site. Which is why companies like youtube, break, metacfe, or other video sharing sites would bid for the spot to be the default upload.
This same feature could be done with the audio editor with any podcast hosting service for audio files. Once more, this could be done with pictures and picture sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa. From the picture sharing sites prints could be ordered too.
I see this type of application suite be critical for Linux. Most of the code for a suite like this already exist in current Linux apps and the code could be used if it’s licensed under the GPL. It would be great if an organization or foundation would form to create this application suite. I would hope that this organization or foundation would focus on keeping the application suite licensed GPL, using free non- proprietary formats, giving a continuous look and feel between all of the apps, organize development for the suite and making the foundation financial self sustaining.
Who knows, after an easy to use home suite was developed maybe a professional suite could be developed too.
Linux has conquered the server market, the key to the home desktop market is Multimedia.
Who’s with me on this?
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