A “No go” on Linux
So, I don’t even know precisely what you can do with this software, how it works, etc. – I know it’s a video editor and quite popular. That’s it. But versions 16 and 17 (the free versions, anyway) will not import .mp4 files on Linux. Supposedly they will import .mov files but that didn’t work for me, either. When I imported .mp4 files the thumbnail, in Davinci was just blank and you could not preview nor edit anything. I found a video on YouTube that described this problems and it suggested you could circumvent the issue by converting an .mp4 to an .mov file with ffmpeg and some code. Well, when I tried to convert a 196 megabyte .mp4 using the code I ended the process when the file that was being created in .mov format was almot 5 gig! I did some reading and support for common codecs is horrible with DaVinci on Linux – especially with the free version.
It works fine on Windows – so far
I dual boot for precisely these sorts of reasons. After trying DaVinci on Linux I thought I’d install it on Windows (Windows 11, in this case) and it was so problematic on Linux I was a bit doubtful that it would not be buggy on Windows. While I have no idea how you use this software for editing (and if the thing is fully functional on Windows) .mp4 files did import and things appear to work. This is version 16.2.8 (if I recall correctly) and I did copy some cracked files over some system files. I am likely never going to use this anyway, but, if I found it to be something I used I would buy it – I have bought a mountain of software. Anyway, in terms of of codecs everything seems to work on Windows.
About the supposed Linux “fix”
The following code is proposed in a YouTube video for converting .mp4 file to .mov format which then, according to the video, should work with Davinci on Linux.
mkdir transcoded; for i in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vcodec mjpeg -q:v 2 -acodec pcm_s16be -q:a 0 -f mov "transcoded/${i%.*}.mov"; done
Two observations regarding this workaround
- I used this code to convert an .mp4 to a .mov file and I actually terminated the conversion process when a 196 meg .mp4 file reached a size approaching 5 gig!
- I susbsequently just grabbed a small .mov file I had on my computer (should have done that in the first place) and it failed identically to the .mp4, anyway.
After the above screwing around, I decided to see – as I’ve said – if the darned thing would just work on Windows (again, as I’ve said, it appeared to work fine on Windows). Interestingly a lot of people commented on the YouTube video to which I referred and almost universally they said this fix worked. Well, it did not work for me.