Well, that was disapointing!
Growing tired of Windows and Microsoft’s shenannigans I figured I’d install Linux on another one of my machines.
I do all sorts of things on this particular machine, and one of those things is that I sometimes edit videos with Davinci Resolve.
Most of my video editing is done on a much beefier machine downstairs, but the projects are kept in a Postgres database and the media
on a NAS, so I can edit from any machine on the network.
I knew that using Linux for occasional editing would present some challenges with path mappings (R:\Resolve\xxx is /home/tassiebob/Resolve/xxx on Linux for example), but the thing I didn’t expect was that the Linux version of Davinci Resolve doesn’t support H.264! …and all my source media is encoded with H.264!
YES, DAVINCI RESOLVE 18 DOESN’T SUPPORT H.264 ON LINUX.
Now to be fair, Davinci Resolve Studio (that would cost me about AUD$450) does claim to support H.264 on Linux, although whether there’s any caveats with that I don’t know - because I haven’t spent the AUD$450 and I probably won’t. What grates my gears though is that the free edition of Resolve DOES support H.264 on Windows, and apparently on Mac as well. It’s just Linux users that are left out in the cold.
There are workarounds, such as using ffmpeg to convert the source material into another format, then work on it in Resolve, render to another format, and then use ffmpeg again to convert the final render to H.264. But really?
I’ve also read that Resolve Studio on Linux doesn’t support AAC audio, but I’ve not confirmed that either way.
Maybe later versions of Resolve will, umm, resolve this H.264 on Linux issue.
But today, if you’re a user of the free Davinci Resolve version 18, and you want to convert your workstation to Linux, BEWARE.
For me, I either need to do my editing with the Windows version of Resolve, or see if my fairly simple needs can be met with something like kdenlive.