<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/ffmpeg.html">ffmpeg</a> has finally been accepted into Debian. Thanks to the ftp-masters for that! smilutils will obviously be rebuilt to take advantage of it (thus providing ffmpeg2raw). That, combined with ffmpeg2theora and its integration in Kino, will soon greatly enlarge the scope of what video editing is possible in Debian: capturing of DV from a digital camcorder (or a raw DV file), adding footage from other sources in other formats, mixing all of that, then turning the result into a nice Theora file you can put on the web for downloading (maybe even streaming one day).
Coincidentally (or not), I'm very probably going to put all that to good use: a couple of juggling friends started a club passing workshop, with the explicit purpose of adding more videos to the passing database. Since most of us have digital camcorders, we'll probably end up with lots of footage to edit and publish.
Maybe that's when I'm going to start writing effects plugins for Kino and/or nagging upstream about Kino 2.0. We'll see.
