I bought a little hand friendly thing with a lot of buttons and wheels – a Jog-Shuttle called “Contour ShuttlePro v2”. It’s supposed to make video editing a lot easier by putting most of the functions you need on the fingertips on one hand. With mouse and keyboard there is a lot of moving around.
I got a bit of trouble while setting it up – so here is my write up for later reference – perhaps mostly for me after a reinstall.
Getting Kdenlive to recognize it
Out of the box some key work as mouse buttons and the wheel acts as a mouse wheel. The other buttons do nothing. But Kdenelive doesn’t find it.
I followed the manual and set up an udev rule. Get root and create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/90-contour-shuttleXpress.rules . Put this line into it:
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0b33", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0030", MODE="0444"
Now we have to find the device address. Open a console and enter
fgrep Contour -A4 /proc/bus/input/devices
My output was:
N: Name="Contour Design ShuttlePRO v2" P: Phys=usb-0000:00:1a.0-1.1/input0 S: Sysfs=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb3/3-1/3-1.1/3-1.1:1.0/0003:0B33:0030.0001/input/input3 U: Uniq= H: Handlers=mouse0 event0
The event0 in the last line is the number to be entered at Kdenlives dialog – in my case as /dev/input/event0.
Now Kdenlive found the thing an I could set up some keys. (Findig a good keymapping is another thing….. ) But the wheel made funny stuff – like the mouse wheel. Somehow Kdenlive got the events in duplicate – as mouse wheel and jog-shuttle. Chaos.
In a mailing list I found the solution: disable xinput for this thing. Look for the device by
xinput --list
I found the line
↳ Contour Design ShuttlePRO v2 id=8 [slave pointer (2)]
And with the line
xinput set-int-prop 8 "Device Enabled" 8 0
I got rid of it in xinput. The first 8 is the id of the device, the second one is magic. 
Now it works like a charm.