It’s been over 3 months since I’ve requested for help on the kdenlive subreddit and have still not gotten a solution other than using v23.08.5 of kdenlive as it doesn’t get this error.
I’m running Windows 11 23H2 and have been using kdenlive for over half a year. I’ve used kdenlive on the last day of 2024 and it worked fine, as soon as 2025 rolled around however, I began receiving this error for any video or audio file I tried importing - which does not happen with images!
I’ve tried:
restarting kdenlive
rebooting my PC
changing the date back to 2024
using experimental versions
using different drives
using different file names
updating to an insider version of Windows 11 (22535.5025)
none of these got me anywhere and I still get the same problem on the latest stable release (v24.12.3)
I am completely stumped as to why v23 faces no problems but any v24 does.
Any suggestions other than having to reinstall Windows or switching to Linux - which I strictly do not wish to do - is greatly appreciated!
Sorry to hear that you haven’t found a solution yet but please keep in mind that while a forum like this or r/kdenlive are a good source for help or tips & tricks the only place to report a bug is bugs.kde.org.
What you describe seems like a bug or an issue that can have multiple causes (and a Windows update may be equally at fault) and needs under-the-hood investigation by the dev team.
I stick with Windows because I’m used to it (lots of tweaks have been done to make it less of an annoyance). I have been trying out Arch with KDE as the DE on another PC and have been enjoying what it has to offer! - but I’m just not ready to switch over regardless of the things I’ve learned.
I’ve also submitted a proper bug report yesterday as suggested by berndmj and I’m currently waiting on responses there.
THANK YOU for this post. I was also having this same issue, and reverting to 23.08.5 fixed it. In my case the problem started randomly happening in 2025 also, and was on a Windows 10 box that hadn’t been opened much or had any installations/updates since the last time I had edited.
I don’t have the bad version installed now, but I was getting a config wizard error about “Missing MLT module: avformat (FFmpeg)” (incorrect, confirmed via commandline on both the standalone ffmpeg and the one installed to path) and missing “avfilter”. I got the same error when I would try to add any video, and I definitely have correct codecs. Again, this was functioning in 2024 just fine.
Anyway. Definitely a bug present on Windows, might be time-based somehow?
Says there’s a problem with the MLT build you have available, either in how it was built or how it is installed. Or possibly some conflict with multiple versions installed.
You might want to try cleaning out any trace of old versions - there should be some hints on doing that in the docs and/or in other posts on this forum (@berndmj is usually pretty good with remembering where to find that, but I always forget : )
I’m a bit overdue for an update here as I wanted to make sure before I post any updates, that I try out v25.07.70 (portable, build 10035 + 10204) and to my surprise - files successfully load into the project!
I don’t wish to consider this fixed just yet, at least until v25 properly releases, otherwise everything is working and I hope the importing problem goes away in v25 for anyone else too.
I appreciate the response! I tried that first, completely cleaned it out with no trace in the file structure or windows registry and reinstalled: same problem. I swear, it’s a very very weird one.
Ooh, thanks for the prompt reply! I’ll try that build. Maybe i’ll diff it with the failing build and try to figure out where the issue’s sitting specifically. Nice that we have all these standalones to easily swap around! Great tool.
