OpenShot is a great non-linear video editor for Linux.

When i started to use it to edit my videos, all recorded with a Kodak Zi8 in 720p, on Ubuntu Lucid I found a lot of white artifacts (noise, dots) in black areas. Not nice at all.
Searching the web I quickly found this to be a bug in MLT rather than OpenShot it self. People reports the same behavior in Kdenlive as well, not a surprise.

Since the bug is fixed in the MLT git repo, but not in the version found in Ubuntu Lucid, I decided it was time to build my own .deb, based on the 0.5.4 found in Lucid, but with the right patch:

sudo apt-get build-dep mlt

apt-get source mlt

cd mlt

Apply this patch patch to src/modules/avformat/producer_avformat.c

If you don’t like patch, you can safely do s/_FAST// on producer_avformat.c, that’s the only change.

Then

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

cd ..

dpkg -i *.deb

… or something like that.

You don’t need to install all .debs of course, and you should probably change the version number and perhaps tell dpkg about your package, or it will be “upgraded”.

Note: If you like to export HD (x264) video for i.e YouTube or Vimeo you will need a x264 enabled ffmpeg as well, please read more about that here