The VideoLAN Forums

Hello VLC forum,

I successfully compiled VLC 2.2.8 using the contrib method (static libraries) but I can not find the executable to launch VLC within the build directory in my home folder according to this page: https://wiki.videolan.org/UnixCompile/

The above page says the following command should work: # ./vlc but it says file not found and that same page also says it is not necessary to use 'make install' when VLC should launch directly from the build directory in my home folder without having to install it on to my system. Do I have to install VLC to my system (make install) for the executable file to be created? I'm pretty sure there were no errors during the compile process.

Help would be appreciated.

Roy

When the wiki page mentions build directory, it means build directory.

There is not one occurrence of the word "home" on that page.

Is it okay to put the build directory in the home directory? Any other directory would be root and I do not think I should compile as root. When I ran ./vlc I was in the build directory.

That can only mean one of two things: you did not follow the instructions, or you ignored some fatal error.

You were right on the first count. I did not thoroughly read the documentation pages. I did not know that after running make in the contrib directory I then had to run ./configure and make from the uppermost directory of the uncompressed tarball. So thank you much.

Roy