Installing Kdenlive through Command line!

Kdenlive is a great free opensource alternative to Adobe Premiere Pro, making it accessible to anyone with a computer and also allowing you to tweak whatever you feel is necessary through code. In this article I will be explaining how to install Kdenlive through their source code which will give you the freedom to edit the software when and where you want.

Firstly, to make the downloading and installation process run a little smoother, you’ll want to download the MLT framework first.

Follow the steps below in order to do so:

You’ll need to download this file https://github.com/mltframework/mlt/archive/refs/tags/v7.0.1.tar.gz

Then run the following command in your terminal showed below:

tar -xzf Dowloads/FILENAME.tar.gz

Your FILENAME should be the name of your downloaded MLT file.

Now that you completed downloading the MLT file, there should be a new folder titled “mlt” in your directory.

Now for the actually building of Kdenlive within your terminal. There are a few different aspects of the software we need to actually build in order to get Kdenlive up and running. Use this link https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/blob/master/dev-docs/build.mdJOB for a step-by-step tutorial for downloading and installing Kdenlive through source. This will also give you a few different options of commands you can apply in order to install Kdenlive so that it best fits your needs. It also supplies a few different commands for effects and tools to use while using Kdenlive.

Below I’ll write the commands in the order I used them to install Kdenlive in a way that suits my use of the software.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kdenlive/kdenlive-master
sudo apt update

sudo apt remove kdenlive kdenlive-data

sudo apt install build-essential git cmake extra-cmake-modules libsm-dev

sudo apt install libkf5archive-dev libkf5bookmarks-dev libkf5coreaddons-dev libkf5config-dev \
libkf5configwidgets-dev libkf5dbusaddons-dev libkf5kio-dev libkf5widgetsaddons-dev \
libkf5notifyconfig-dev libkf5newstuff-dev libkf5xmlgui-dev libkf5declarative-dev \
libkf5notifications-dev libkf5guiaddons-dev libkf5textwidgets-dev libkf5purpose-dev \
libkf5iconthemes-dev kdoctools-dev libkf5crash-dev libkf5filemetadata-dev kio \
kinit qtdeclarative5-dev libqt5svg5-dev qml-module-qtquick-controls libqt5networkauth5-dev \
qtmultimedia5-dev qtquickcontrols2-5-dev breeze-icon-theme breeze

sudo apt install frei0r-plugins ffmpeg

sudo apt install libmlt++-dev libmlt-dev melt

sudo apt install ruby subversion gnupg2 gettext

git clone https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive.git

git clone https://github.com/mltframework/mlt.git 

INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/.local
JOBS=4

cd mlt
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-gpl3 --prefix=$INSTALL_PREFIX
make -j$JOBS
make install

cd ../kdenlive
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$INSTALL_PREFIX-   DKDE_INSTALL_USE_QT_SYS_PATHS=ON -DRELEASE_BUILD=OFF

make -j$JOBS
make install

And finally, you should be able to open and run Kdenlive through the command:

. prefix.sh
kdenlive

All commands stated above are from https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/blob/master/dev-docs/build.mdJOB