Hello Kdelive team.
I haven’t encountered any bugs in the Windows version yet, so I’m satisfied. I’m going to test it on Debian and then I’ll share my conclusions. Congratulations on such a fast release; it impressed me.
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I’ve noticed two things while trying it:
- The “Logging” and “Editing” layout names don’t show translated.
- In the “Logging” layout, the media preview width is unnecessarily big, leaving little space for the file list in the Media Browser.
EDIT:
1.
It’s more than that. It seems none of the layout names are being taken from the appropriate strings.
In the case of “Audio” and “Color”, as their names are the same in English and Spanish I’ve overlooked them at first, but they are really also showing in English.
The only layout name that is being translated is “Efectos” (Effects), but even in that case its name is wrongly taken from another string, and not from the one intended for that purpose.
These are the strings that seem to be intended for that:
#: src/layouts/layoutcollection.cpp:26
#, kde-format
msgctxt “Short layout name for logging interface”
msgid “Logging”
msgstr “Registro”
#: src/layouts/layoutcollection.cpp:26
#, kde-format
msgctxt “Short layout name for editing interface”
msgid “Editing”
msgstr “Edición”
#: src/layouts/layoutcollection.cpp:27
#, kde-format
msgctxt “Short layout name for audio interface”
msgid “Audio”
msgstr “Audio”
#: src/layouts/layoutcollection.cpp:27
#, kde-format
msgctxt “Short layout name for effects interface”
msgid “Effects”
msgstr “Efectos”
#: src/layouts/layoutcollection.cpp:28
#, kde-format
msgctxt “Short layout name for color grading interface”
msgid “Color”
msgstr “Color”
Thank you for the feedback. The strings coming from .json files and JBM is checking how to extract those for translation.
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I’ve been using adobe for almost 20 years professionally and I can count the number of times I “needed” to refer to docs on one hand.
My constructive criticism is that such a great feature should be shouted from the rooftops.
For example, first start mini gif tutorials like some 3d apps do. “did you know you have access to online resources directly from kdenlive?”
This way your hard work doesn’t go undiscovered….wasted effort.
For years blender devs were snarky about user feedback and it was stagnant. They addressed the criticisms and it became widely adopted…coincidence? 
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I think a “did you know” window would be interesting. With the upcoming 25.12 version with introducing a welcome screen on which you can select direct a project, an additional “did you now” would be too much.
Thinking a bit loud: should that “did you know” window pop up when a project is opened?
I could think of following “did you know” feature which Kdenlive has:
Online resources with preview and direct project integration
-
Automatic subtitle generation and translation
-
Automatic background removal
-
Automatic clip alignment either to audio or timecode
-
Automatic motion tracking and using the keyframes in other effects
-
…
Has anything changed with the window position/sizing with this version when Kdenlive first starts? Previous versions have all started maximised if that was how I used it when it was previously closed, but this version opens in a smallish window and often with no top Windows bar (with the Maximise, Minimise & Close options). Because there is no Windows bar, I have to use a shortcut (Win + Up Arrow) to maximise it.
This is in Win 10 BTW.
Version 25.12 introduced a new widget system which gives you the full freedom to arrange the window as you like. Maybe this causes the small window at the first start of Kdenlive. Once you have arranged the window to full size it should be OK after a Kdenlive restart.
If you still experience the issue, please upload here a screenshot.
Make sure you have Visual Effects set correct. Hit the Windows key, type Performance, set to: Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer
I had a few customisations on the Visual effects settings. Setting those to back the defaults restored the Windows bar at startup, but behaviour is still weird.
- With Kdenlive maximised, and then closed, at the next startup, I get No. 1 in the image below.
- If I click the middle icon on the Windows bar, which you would expect to maximise it, I get No. 2 in the image - the Windows bar disappears and it doesn’t maximise. This is how it was opening before I reset the Visual effects settings.
- If I then use the maximise shortcut (Win + Up Arrow), then it maximises as expected. If I close it and re-open, we go back to No. 1 above.
Only this version behaves this way. Previous release versions were OK, as is every other program. This is a 27” 1920x1080 screen, and it reopens at half width and half height in the top left corner every time.
Can you try completely clearing/removing your old configuration files?
It’s possible some old state in those is fighting with the persisted settings for the new dock widget over the constraints for your layout.
If you can restore your settings, then you can try: Settings → Reset Configuration
I tried Settings > Reset Configuration. No change.
I then uninstalled Kdenlive completely and manually deleted all program folders and any associated folders in AppData, etc. (after backing them up to another drive), then did a clean install of the RC, but it’s still the same.
BTW, I noticed when reinstalling that there’s a typo in the new smaller splash screen. It should presumably say “Made by KDE”, but it says “Make by KDE”.
I tested with the latest RC on Win10 and can confirm the issue with the small window when Kdenlive is started and missing header line. Thank you for reporting.
Thanks for spotting the typo. Will be corrected.
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Makes you wonder how many subtly cool things it can do that you’ve been blissfully unaware of for all of these years too, doesn’t it!
It’s never too late in life to realise that learning is a good thing, and that your new tool is not your old tool, and that not knowing, or even being curious about, how your tools work and what they can really do inevitably hampers your ability to use them well.
such a great feature should be shouted from the rooftops
If we constantly shouted about every great feature that is a fantastic benefit to some user, there would be so much noise that we’d all go deaf. That’s why there’s a whole book full of them. There’s already a constant stream of new features to explain and promote. If you want re-runs of that, we have archives you can read too.
If we ignore being too … let’s go with ‘experienced’ … to read the manual - you still somehow managed to miss this in a commonly used drop down menu with only 9 options in it. Burying it in thousands of fantastic things we could shout about surely doesn’t improve your odds there at all.
This way your hard work doesn’t go undiscovered….wasted effort
You not knowing things doesn’t make the ability to do them ‘wasted effort’. It just makes other, more curious, people’s experiences fuller than yours.
Yeah, lots of projects have tried that sort of thing, and they can be ok as an onboarding tool for new users - but you need to be able to turn them off so as not to drive users barking mad after they do now know them and have seen all those messages too many times - which leaves us right where we are now, with the people who think they already know more than our manual could possibly ever teach them immediately turning them off and continuing to not know them and not knowing that they don’t know them.
We have an open forum here, where anyone can proudly announce cool things they’ve only just learned, and people making cool tutorials in various places. That’s probably a better stage for this sort of thing, because the best ‘did you know’ kind of things tend to avalanche learning in a community forum, where people can interactively explore them, in rich ways that just don’t happen with snippets from a broadcast animated paperclip factoid.
The paradox of documentation is the more of it you write, the less likely most people are to actually read it, so we’re probably best off focussing on quality (in one well maintained reference manual and detailed release announcements) and contextual clues (in the tooltips and status messages and good UI design et al.) – and just let natural selection choose which people can set the VCR clock, which people can’t, and which people make tutorials for frustrated folks whose eager-reader kids have left home and now none of their clocks tell the right time.
It’s possible that it might be worth having some sort of changelog chapter in the manual - to highlight the things that were added or notably improved with each release - so that people can quickly get up to speed from the last point they’d been familiar with. But I’ll leave the real merits of something like that for the manual authors to decide.
What’s New — Kdenlive Manual 25.08 documentation . Back to the refactoring release of the timeline.
Yes. The thing is, our documentation describes “icon by icon” but that is not how to learn how a software is working and the concept behind. We started to show/described in the documentation how to use a feature in context but still, this is just a starting point.
\o/ 
A little “I wonder if” on the forum works its magic again!
our documentation describes “icon by icon” but that is not how to learn how a software is working and the concept behind.
Don’t sell the excellent work you all did on that short. I think it does a pretty good job of both introducing some fundamental concepts, and being a reference for the details, and it still improves on that with every release just like the code does.
We can’t possibly be the single source of everything that everyone needs to know about this subject - it’s just far too broad, and the needs of different users are just far too, well, different. But we have some great user contributed tutorials, some of which are also highlighted in the manual, and many of which hit that perfect sweet spot of not being a contrived example highlighting something we want to sell you, but being the real life journaling of real users, sharing what they learned about something they wanted to learn how to do.
[Special shout outs to @Arkengheist, who was always at the top of the most useful search results when I was first exploring my own kdenlive flows, and to @nuxttux who has shared some great work in that space more recently. We don’t see people throwing bouquets of thanks your way nearly as much as you deserve!]
The other weird paradox about documentation is that usually the worst people to initially write it are the people who know the most about what you want explained. They generally know too much about all the terrible little details to reliably be a good judge of what the other people who don’t will most need to have explained. So it really is a Good Thing to have much of the documentation driven by real user experiences - not in the sense that they should be directly telling us what should or shouldn’t be Shouted From The Rooftops in it, they in their turn are usually the worst judges of that - but in the sense that if we find people being similarly confused more than once, that’s probably a sign that either there’s something important we forgot to document, or we need to take a good look at how the UI/UX might guide them better down the Right Path toward a World With Zero FAQs…
We don’t really have that many FAQs about the actual operation of the software. Most of the genuine repetition we see here is either wishlist things that are Somewhere on the roadmap, beginner misconceptions about some fundamental aspect of how video and video editing Really Works, or something that even a cursory look at the manual or most basic of search engine queries would have been able to answer. And whatever other problems we might have, being widely adopted doesn’t seem like one of them!
So I am running it on Windows 11, I get the startup screen then nothing. When I look at task manager it shows it running, but I can’t get to the app.
Just upgraded from 25.08.0 to 25.12.0, and now Kdenlive won’t open the main window.
I’m running Debian Sid (unstable) and Hyprland 0.52.1 (i.e. Wayland), and am using the Kdenlive build on deb-multimedia . org which, in my experience, is usually the least problematic.
Upon launch, the new startup window appears, listing recently opened projects. Upon selecting a project, the load progress popup appears, then both windows disappear, and the main window never appears. ps shows the program is running. Running Kdenlive from the command line prints out a ton of status and progress messages, but nothing obviously stands out as the culprit. Running kdenlive -–no-welcome doesn’t help (indeed, in this mode, pressing CTRL-C has no effect; you have to resort to CTRL-\ to kill the program).
This is more annoying than usual, as I was in the middle of working on a personal project. Rolling back to 25.08.0 isn’t (easily) possible, as deb-multimedia only keeps the most recent version. I have not yet tried purging the config files. I’m about to try rebooting, as other system libraries got updated as well.
Suggestions welcome.
Try with the AppImage from the download page: Downloads - Kdenlive . Hopefully you can finish the project.