The VideoLAN Forums

I'm following the installation manual from Win32 Cygwin Environment
and Compile HOWTO. I'm having difficulties extracting the contrib file(6.1):

6.1 Extracting the "contrib" package
=========================================

Copy the "contrib" package from your download/install location to the home directory:

C:\cygwin\home\Administrator

Start Cygwin and enter the following command in your shell:

tar xjvf contrib-20060526-win32-bin-gcc-3.4.5-only.tar.bz2 -C / (example)

Replace with your version of the "contrib" file and DON'T FORGET THE / (backslash)
at the end.

This will extract the contents of the file into usr/win32 folder within your Cygwin
environment.

NOTE: Make sure to DELETE your old version instead of extracting a new version on
top of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I get to typing the command, "tar xjvf contrib-20060526-win32-bin-gcc-3.4.5-only.tar.bz2 -C / " I get an error message:

bzip2: (stdln) is not a bzip2 file.
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

I made sure that the extention is .tar.bz2 and not .tar.tar. I also copied the file into the owner folder in cygwin. There was a message stating cygwin should not be installed in "C:", so I installed it in a subfolder in " desktop". Could someone please help me?!?

Hum ... did you download the contrib file ? (else i don't know why it would try to look at stdin)

Yes I did download the most updated file. (20060619 - I believe).

Check the size of your downloaded file and compare it with the original size. I noticed many times with MS IE that it unpacks .gz and bz2 files during downloading. If it is the case with you, try

tar xvt ...

command line, i.e. like it is just tar.