Howto: Compile the development version of vlc under the latest Ubuntu release

[andrew.46]

I see that the vlc developers have upped their flac version to 1.3.0-pre4 as flac slowly moves towards a new release. After a bit more vlc guide housekeeping this guide might very well follow suit. For those who wish to get in ahead of me here is a link:

http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/f...3.0pre4.tar.xz

Looks like it is just about ready for release...

[mc4man]

Just to throw out for heck of, attaching slightly modified ffmpeg install com set.

The 4 exports seem to work out, ffmpeg seems a bit picky, may be 'improved'?
The datadir & mandir paths are only best guess ..., mans work which is all I care about

Sole purpose is to build current git binaries for ffmpeg & x264

[andrew.46]

I have updated the version of FFmpeg used in the guide to 1.2.1 "Magic", latest successful compile was 5 minutes ago:

andrew@corinth:~$ cvlc --version | head -n 3
VLC media player 2.1.0-pre1 Rincewind (revision 335457e)
VLC version 2.1.0-pre1 Rincewind (335457e)
Compiled by andrew on corinth (May 11 2013 07:55:30)
Compiler: gcc version 4.7.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.3-1ubuntu1)
andrew@corinth:~$

64bit Raring VM now in place and it looks like both 32bit and 64bit versions of this guide are running very nicely. (I have temporarily shelved the flac upgrade as it looks like flac has a very tangled dependency structure under Ubuntu so I will wait for the release version and look again.) Now to have a look at a few of those libraries that the vlc ./configure is missing and see if they are worth chasing up...

[mc4man]

I have updated the version of FFmpeg used in the guide to 1.2.1 "Magic", latest successful compile was 5 minutes ago:


64bit Raring VM now in place and it looks like both 32bit and 64bit versions of this guide are running very nicely. (I have temporarily shelved the flac upgrade as it looks like flac has a very tangled dependency structure under Ubuntu so I will wait for the release version and look again.) Now to have a look at a few of those libraries that the vlc ./configure is missing and see if they are worth chasing up...

Gave it on quick try on a minimal static of flac, (only built flac & libsndfile), built/installed fine but the libflac.so was borked on an ogg symbol. Didn't do an ogg rebuild as that gets a bit "tangled".
( though as far as playback really didn't 'seem' to matter as vlc used avcodec instead.

So just went with a shared flac build & all seems well - tested both normal & 24bit flac in various players no issue. No chance yet to try an encoder but should be fine.

ldd '/usr/local/lib/vlc/plugins/codec/libflac_plugin.so'
linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff6f7b1000)
libvlccore.so.5 => /usr/local/lib/libvlccore.so.5 (0x00007f0b740a3000)
libFLAC.so.8 => /usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.8 (0x00007f0b73e52000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f0b73a89000)
librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0x00007f0b73881000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f0b73664000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f0b7345f000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f0b7315a000)
libdbus-1.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdbus-1.so.3 (0x00007f0b72f16000)
libogg.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libogg.so.0 (0x00007f0b72d0e000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f0b745aa000)

main decoder debug: looking for decoder module matching "any": 38 candidates
[0x7f631cc04d98] main decoder debug: using decoder module "flac"

13.04 will never get a new flac, 13.10 should but that doesn't mean it will. (would be surprised if it isn't, not much work to do on it at all

(git-clone can be just git, at some point git-clone will be dropped entirely.

[andrew.46]

Gave it on quick try on a minimal static of flac, (only built flac & libsndfile), built/installed fine but the libflac.so was borked on an ogg symbol.

Hmm... was this something like:

/usr/lib/libogg.so: could not read symbols: File in wrong format

This was an issue that I ran into with Slackware and eventually solved here. But this was a multilib problem and possibly Slackware specific, the compile process was finding the wrong libogg on a system with both 32bit and 64bit copies.

( though as far as playback really didn't 'seem' to matter as vlc used avcodec instead.

Exactly, I am assuming that vlc uses flac directly to transcode but I have not tested this yet.

13.04 will never get a new flac, 13.10 should but that doesn't mean it will. (would be surprised if it isn't, not much work to do on it at all

For this guide I may very well wait, 13.10 is just around the corner after all

(git-clone can be just git, at some point git-clone will be dropped entirely.

Now I am a little intrigued by that, I am not the greatest git-master in the world and I had not heard that the commands were changing.

Now off to test out the newest flac:

andrew@skamandros~$ flac --version
flac 1.3.0pre4

[mc4man]

re: git-clone, meant git-core the package, didn't catch what I was typing..

The error in the plugin off of static build was quite specific, an ogg function (undefined), meant to copy out but didn't.

But easy to retrieve -

cannot load module `/usr/local/lib/vlc/plugins/codec/libflac_plugin.so' (/usr/local/lib/vlc/plugins/codec/libflac_plugin.so: undefined symbol: ogg_stream_reset)

[andrew.46]

As a sort of weekend bonus I have added details of how to download and setup a rather large pack of skins for vlc. I am not so keen but perhaps others are? I attach a screenshot of a slightly scary Windows MediaPlayer skin...

[andrew.46]

I have added in the required gtk library to build the notify plugin for vlc. Seems a little twitchy on my system with a few vlc crashes but it builds and works for the most part. Screenshot attached...

[andrew.46]

Goom has arrived back again and a big thanks to alienBOB for much of the work massaging the old source code into some shape. I have sourced a newer patch which appears to get around some of the trouble with 32bit vlc and seg faults however I have discovered that 2 visualisations at leat (goom and ProjectM) crash vlc when switching tracks in a playlist, only on 32bit vlc as far as I can see. I would be interested to hear if anybody can duplicate this and even better give a fix .

As always a screenshot attached, hope the Forums software does not convert this to a jpg again!

[andrew.46]

I have added in instruction to compile libdvdcss as Medibuntu has gone at least for the moment. Could not get 1.2.13 to compile but I will have another look later unless somebody can solve the issue earlier!