VLC and Fedora 24

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Do you need really to wait for someone else to check that VLC 2.2.x won't even build with FFmpeg 3.0?

Patch welcome.

[Marseille07]

I don't understand your question. Do you really expect ordinary users to download the source, run configure and debug the buildability of VLC 2.2.x with FFmpeg 3.0?
Why is it unreasonable to ask VLC devs to confirm this information in this forum? It seems perfectly reasonable to me.

[ollybain]

I think they're writing from the point of view of volunteers who already have an awful lot to do, and who aren't the same people that did the Fedora bundling. However, I'm just guessing. This all operates on goodwill, after all.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Well it took two minutes of googling to find one of several answers to your question: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/50697

[Marseille07]

Great, thank you. That's all I wanted investigated, really.

It's not the difficulty of finding answers; the real value comes from VLC devs confirming the matter, instead of some user running some experiment and arriving at some answer.

[mj5030]

So did you install FFmpeg and VLC from the RPMFusion repository? If so there's quite a bit of trouble. For starters, I have experienced that the x265 libraries used to compile FFmpeg on RPMFusion are not the ones that are currently being used on RPMFusion. Just type "ffmpeg" in a terminal, if it spits back some library errors it can't find you'll know. The easiest way to get a full working version of VLC on Fedora 24 and Fedora 25 is to compile FFmpeg and VLC yourself. Make sure you install all the development libraries you need to compile VLC and FFmpeg. There are sites that tell you which ones you need, all can be installed via Fedora or RPMFusion repositories.

Make a directory for the install -

$ cd ~
$ mkdir src_install
$ cd src_install

First off compile and install FFmpeg -

$ git clone git://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg
$ cd ffmpeg
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure --enable-pic --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx265 --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-libx264 --enable-libfdk-aac
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make install-libs install-headers
$ sudo sed -i_bak 's#Libs: -L${libdir} -lavutil -lm#\
Libs: -L${libdir} -lavutil -lm -lX11 -lm -lvdpau -lva -lva-drm -lva-x11#' \
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/libavutil.pc

The last command, sed, is used to add some necessary things to libavutil.pc so VLC compiles properly

Next compile and install VLC -

$ cd ~/src_install
$ git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git vlc
$ cd vlc
$ ./bootstrap
$ export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include"
$ export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib"
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig"
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig

If you are compiling from VLC and FFmpeg from scratch make sure to remove the rpm installations of them, including ffmpeg-devel, if that is installed. The 'export CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS, PKG_CONFIG_PATH' are used to specify the ffmpeg-devel files that you've compiled and installed instead of using ffmpeg-devel from RPMFusion. If your specify --prefix to a path you want FFmpeg installed during FFmpeg configuration make sure to change those respectively.

If there are any problems with the compilation please let me know. I have successfully installed FFmpeg and VLC using this method. VLC works currently on my installation with zero playback errors using both current gits of VLC (3.0.0) and FFmpeg (3.1.4), with this method. So far every file type I have tried including DVDs works flawlessly. Whereas the RPMFusion VLC release was constantly giving me "gstreamer missing plugin" errors and can not open file type errors, resulting in the video or audio not working. VLC relies a lot on FFmpeg, if FFmpeg is broken, VLC will be as well. Compiling VLC alone with ffmpeg-devel from RPMFusion will not solve the problem from what I've seen. The best method is to use what I have listed.