Pitivi is a truly unique video editor.

With its "no downstream hacks" and "upstream first" approach, it acts as a cutting-edge catalyst to push open-source technologies we love forward.

It champions design and usability research: there is no eternal newbie, and Pitivi's user interface is carefully designed to suit both the newcomer and the professional, to be efficient and intuitive. We adhere to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and regularly discuss with artists all around the planet to tackle the hard problems the right way, to make complex tasks easy to accomplish.

It is a vibrant community-driven project, backed by longstanding contributors with a strong interest and experience in multimedia.

Ecosystem

Pitivi is based on the GStreamer Editing Services library in which we take part. With the GStreamer Editing Services library, we are laying solid foundations for the future based upon over a decade of experience. Built atop the giant shoulders of the industry-standard GStreamer multimedia framework, GES reduces fragmentation and risk while allowing diversity for application writers and adaptability for all kinds of purposes.

The pipeline-based GStreamer multimedia framework is in use on most of the Linux systems. GStreamer, being cross-platform, is used widely also on Win, Mac and on embedded devices. Thus, lots of people benefit when we fix a bug upstream, in GStreamer, or push for new features to cover the demanding video-editing use-case.

In addition to GStreamer's own codecs and video/audio effects, we can use other framework's codecs and effects, such as FFMPEG and Frei0r, through various GStreamer plugins available in the good/bad/ugly collections. You have any multimedia building-block you might want in Pitivi.

Tooling

The many dependent libraries make video editing apps very complex. We use Flatpak to build a dev env in which we know exactly what version of the dependencies exist. Thus you can create a working and stable dev env with minimal effort.