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configuring vlc-0.9.8a on fedora 10 fails with:

configure: error: Could not find libavcodec or libavutil. Use --disable-avcodec to ignore this error.


but:
[root@router vlc-0.9.8a]# ls -al /usr/local/lib/libavcodec*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22919012 2008-12-07 11:38 /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2008-12-07 11:38 /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so -> libavcodec.so.52.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2008-12-07 11:38 /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.52 -> libavcodec.so.52.6.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4911588 2008-12-07 11:38 /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.52.6.0

Maybe "/usr/local/lib/" isn't listed in paths searched by ld (have a look to the next paragraph). I think it is regarding symlinks you have but in case.
Also, have you the -dev packages, are the header files reachable?
You should look what configure wrote about it to config.log file. It is a big file but many interesting things are logged there.

A)
You can try:
1: "sudo ldconfig -v|grep local"
If it shows you /usr/local/lib/, you can retry the configure. Else, try to add this path to ld:
Add a .conf file in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ (roughly), for example "local_lib.conf", containing just the line "/usr/local/lib/" and re-run 1:.

regards.

configure uses pkg-config to search for the libs. So read the man page of pkg-config and set PKG_CONFIG_PATH to where the libavcdec.pc are