The VideoLAN Forums

Dear all,

this is one of my first posts here but I guess there will be many of them as time goes by. I need to work with VLC and mess with the source code and I had some problems compiling the source code.

I got the subversion code and then run the bootstrap command. That developed the necessary files and then run the .configure command. And then the problems start. I get an error for mad and I run ./configure without mad. Then I got a problem finding ffmpeg. I downloaded the ffmpeg source and run ./configure with the command to find the ffmpeg tree. And then .... more things missing.

I would appreciate someone giving me some guidelines in what to download and install, or at least a point to a website with better information than the developer's website for vlc.

I installed vlc using aptitude and that works fine but I need to mess with the source code. Is there a way of using the parts that aptitude downloaded to install the source code and if so does anyone know in which directory I can point my ./configure to find it?

Thanking you in advance,

Pericles

you simply need to install all the "dev" version of the packages that VLC normally depends on. These contain the headers of all the dependencies, which you normally don't need, but do need if you want to compile vlc from source.

I downloaded all the packages from the videolan website. Now can I unpack everything in a directory and tell vlc to get the dependencies from there? If so, how can I spacify the locations of all the dependencies when I run the configure script? I saw that I can do that with ffmpeg by specifying the ffmpeg tree, is that applicable to all other packages?


Pericles

I finally found a very good website with instructions to compile VLC in Ubuntu Breezy but it also works in Ubuntu Dapper.

Anyone that wants to compile vlc in ubuntu can find the information here.

http://www.nanocrew.net/2005/09/01/compiling-vlc/

Hope it helps people in the way it helped me.

Pericles

hi,
thanks for that pointer; I am still facing a problem while executing the last step - I have executed the make command to build vlc:

gcc -Wsign-compare -Wall -pipe -o libscreen_plugin.so -shared -fpic -fPIC -u vlc_entry__0_8_5 libscreen_plugin.a -L/usr/local/lib -lpthread -lX11 -lXext
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lXext
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[6]: *** [libscreen_plugin.so] Error 1
...
$ locate Xext
/usr/lib/libXext.so.6.4.1
/usr/lib/libXext.so.6

is there something wrong with my installation?

You should also install the libxext-dev package.

apt-get install libxext-dev

This should make it work.


Pericles