I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into “smaller” instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can’t remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
The UI has most of all gotten more flexible. Previously you had highly efficient but also hard to learn workflows for everything, now you have a UI which also has non-efficient ways to do everything so you don’t have to be good at everything to get shit done, can build your own mix of “yeah I’m doing this every other second, I want this to be fast, I use that twice a day, I can click through menus for that”. Blender has way more functionality than will ever fit onto keybindings so customising the UI to your workflow is a must if you want to be efficient.
Generally the whole thing has been a giant success, however, I do have a criticism: They made left-click select the default. Right-click select has always been superior but it was not what the Maya etc. folks are used to. Have it available, even as a choice on the first startup screen for those people, sure, but don’t make it the default for people just getting into 3d editing.
And, yes, Blender still breaks plenty of UI conventions in plenty of other areas. Saying “For good reason” would be kinda missing the point, very often it had those conventions before Microsoft or whoever came up with worse ones and made those popular.
Last time I tried blender for video editing, the experience wasn’t great. Has it changed significantly in the last couple of years?
Yes. 100%
No clue about video editing though.
Also, why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
Do you have recommended alternatives? I like it using Blender for video editing because I can automate any arbitrary repetitive task with a Python script.
I’ve tried exactly once (given that I know blender anyway and no video editor), and ran into audio sync issues at export that didn’t happen when playing the timeline from blender. There were some mentions of the issues on forums, but no purported solution worked.
The gist of it is that Blender is not a video editor, but a highly capable 3d kitchen sink containing so many features that, in combination, mean that you can use it to edit videos, outranked in its own area of expertise only by Houdini. There was never a real push to make it particularly good at video editing, and unlike in other areas it didn’t happen by accident, either (Blender is e.g. arguably the best 2d vector editor ever since it got grease pencil).
Yes! the video sequencer has received dramatic improvements over the past years. It now shuffles or overwrites timeline content when you move a strip over another (based on a user setting), it transform-snaps to strip bounds and other elements, it auto-generates proxies so you never have to touch anything, it plays in realtime… for a full overview of improvements see the release notes : https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes
Holy shit, I didn’t know that that’s a feature. For the two times a year I need to edit videos I will never have to deal with shitty free versions/test versions of video editing software ever.
video edit
I’ve heard really good things about Shotcut. I wonder how the two (and Kdenlive as well as commercial competitors) compare. I looked a while ago for some good comparison articles but don’t recall finding any.
Shotcut crashes unexpectedly, on all the machines I’ve tried it on. Not frequently though, & it was so good I used it anyway.
