1 (edited by michaelarrington 2025-09-06 02:17:42)

Hi everyone,

Kinovea has been a fantastic tool for video analysis, especially in sports, education, and research. I really appreciate the features like calibration, angle measurement, and dual video comparison. However, as technology moves forward, I think it would be useful to discuss what features users feel are missing or should be improved in the future versions.

For example:

Would you like to see better support for synchronized multi-camera recording? PolyTrack

Improved data export options (e.g., CSV with more detailed parameters)?

A smoother workflow for annotation and sharing results with athletes or students?

More robust support for new video formats and codecs?

GPU acceleration to improve performance with HD/4K videos?

I believe collecting ideas from the community could help the developers understand what’s most valuable for us.

So, what’s on your wish list for Kinovea? Which features would make the biggest difference in your daily work?

Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!

Best regards

2

Yes please!

Even if I have a long list of areas I want to improve personally, I'm always very curious about the community's priorities and workflows. Especially the little things that can have a big impact in terms of usability.

One area where I badly need help is communication. I'm not on social media I want to focus my time on coding. When I wrap up a release I find it incredibly hard to switch into communication mode and make nice video demonstrations of the features. On top of the written documentation which is itself an endeavor.

I'm currently in the final lengths of version 2025.1. It has many new features and improvements all over the place.

One area that is bothering me personally and has been neglected for many years, all the while being the very first thing people see when they open the program, the file browser. It's currently pretty unusable and completely fails at its mission of quickly navigating the video collection. So in 2026 I want to spend a few weeks upgrading it, make it less stupid.

3

I am a big fan of Kinovea and use it daily, especially for sports biomechanics analysis. If I may, I would like to humbly suggest a few possible improvements:

1) A Dark Mode option for more comfortable viewing.

2) Video export configuration options (e.g., FPS, bitrate key-in).

3) Enabling GPU utilization to help enhance performance.

4) Ability to import CSV files (e.g., kinematics data) and draw overlay charts on video, with a synchronized vertical timeline indicator.

5) Possibility to support plug-in open-source HPE models (e.g., HRNet-W48, RTMpose-L, YOLO) with outputs such as kinematics data (joint coordinates, joint angles, etc.).

Much appreciated, and thank you for your great work on Kinovea!

4

2) Video export configuration options (e.g., FPS, bitrate key-in).

5) Possibility to support plug-in open-source HPE models

Thanks for posting (or reposting) these.

It led me to consider a technical solution that I hadn't fully considered before that could address both.

It is possible to send binary data to external programs through "STDIN". FFmpeg readily accepts this for example. So I could start the external process, go in a loop to feed it the images, and retrieve the result at the end.

This is quite appealing to me because it's very open ended and avoids having to write a C++ wrapper or having to export a temporary video file first. I already have functions to "enumerate" the video frames with or without the user's drawings painted on, so it should just be a matter of feeding that to the external program and hiding this technical aspect under the UI.

Not all external programs will support that out of the box but it should be easier and more maintainable to implement the wrapper externally.

As an experiment I could hook the ffmpeg executable to the video export function and expose H.264 encoding as a "profile". (I don't really want the export dialog to turn into Handbrake user interface with a million options, if this approach works we can have custom profiles defined elsewhere and hidden from view).