I’m new to Blender, so please bear with me if I’m asking something obvious.
I’m interested in using Blender for video editing. I use Ubuntu and my first idea was to install Blender using apt-get, which provided a slightly out of date version that couldn’t handle my h.265 video files. So I downloaded the latest from blender.org, which is 2.73. This worked much better, and I could add clips and preview them, but I noticed that the frame rate in the preview window was around 30 fps, for a video that was shot at 59.94 fps, resulting in a slow motion effect. I did make sure that I set the frame rate in blender to 59.94 first, by the way. The frame rate indicator was shaded red which I took to mean that it couldn’t keep up. Other applications on my system (vlc, etc.) are able to play this video at the full frame rate.
I updated Ubuntu to 14.10, and re-installed Blender, and got version 2.70, which is slightly older than the 2.73 I downloaded from blender.org. However, I was pleased to see that this version of Blender could play my video files at the full frame rate.
I wasn’t too sure what to make of that, but I started looking at ffmpeg version numbers and found (by looking at system-info.txt) that the 2.70 version reported newer versions of ffmeg libraries than the 2.73 version I downloaded from blender.org. For example, avcodec was 56.1.0 versus 55.39.101.
Since ffmpeg is apparently linked in statically, I guess I can see how this could happen. The build host used by blender.org apparently had slightly older ffmpeg libraries than whatever machine built my 2.70 debian package.
Am I on the right track as far as thinking this has to do with the ffmpeg versions, or is there something else going on that explains this?
Thanks for any ideas.