VLC over rhel5
 

Hi All,

I downloaded vlc-1.0.6.tar.bz2 from Internet, and when I tried configuring and installing the same, I am getting different problems. After unzipping the vlc folder on the desktop, I found 38 files/directories. There is 'README' file, bit I am not getting any information in that. Here are the contents of README:

README for the VLC media player
===============================
The VideoLAN web site . . . http://www.videolan.org/
Documentation . . . . . . . http://www.videolan.org/doc/
Support . . . . . . . . . . http://www.videolan.org/support/
Forums . . . . . . . . . . http://forum.videolan.org/
Wiki . . . . . . . . . . . http://wiki.videolan.org/
The Developers site . . . . http://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc.html

ABOUT-NLS - Notes on the Free Translation Project.
AUTHORS - Main VLC authors.
COPYING - The GPL license.
ChangeLog - The VLC ChangeLog.
HACKING - Hacking VLC.
INSTALL - Installation instructions.
INSTALL.win32 - Installation instructions for the Win32 version of VLC.
NEWS - Important modifications between the releases.
README - This file.
THANKS - All VLC contributors.
bindings/ - Bindings around LibVLC.
extras/analyser - Code analyser and editor specific files.
extras/buildsystem - different buildsystems specific files.
extras/contrib - external libraries retrieving facilities for systems that
don't have package manager.
extras/deprecated - Now deprecated files.
extras/misc - Files that don't fit in the other extras/ categories.
extras/package - VLC packaging specific files such as spec files.
include/ - Include files
doc/ - Miscellaneous documentation.
libs/ - libraries that we host.
po/ - languages related files.
projects/ - projects that uses libVLC such as the web browsers plugin.
share/ - Common Resources files.
src/ - VLC and libvlc source code.


There is INSTALL file as well, which contains some commands to configure and build VLC, but that too is not helpful after initial command. Here are the contents to INSTALL file :
=======================================================================
INSTALL file for the VLC media player
More extensive information for *nix, Windows, Mac OS X and BeOS users can be found here: http://developers.videolan.org/vlc/

Bootstrapping VLC
=================
If you retrieved VLC from the git server and do not have a "configure"
script, please refer to the HACKING file.

Configuring VLC
===============
A typical way to configure VLC is:
./configure --prefix=/usr
See `./configure --help' for more information.
If you intend to debug stuff, you may want to compile with debugging
symbols:
make distclean ; ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-debug

We recommend using GCC to build VLC, though some people reported success
with the Intel C compiler (version 8) as well. GCC version 3.3 or higher is required. On older systems (e.g. FreeBSD 4.x, BeOS), please select a more recent version manually by setting the CC and CXX environment variables appropriately while running the ./configure shell script.

Building VLC
============
Once configured, run `make' to build VLC.

Installing and running VLC
==========================
You can install the VLC and its plugins by typing:
make install

But you don't need to install it if you don't want to; VLC can be launched
from the current directory as well:
./vlc

Building packages
=================

To build a Debian package, you need to get the packaging info
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-multimedia/videolan/vlc/debian debian
and then
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc


To build RPM packages, copy a spec file from extra/package/rpm and:
rpm -ba vlc.spec

To build an ipkg package (iPAQ familiar Linux), use:
ipkg-buildpackage
======================================================================

I tried ./configure --prefix=/usr , and it did something, but after that when I tried make INSTALL, it gave me error that 'nothing to do with INSTALL'. Could anybody please help me in installing VLC on my RHEL-5 machine?

Many Thanks in advance,
Kapil

You might want to go over to the atrpms repo and pull their src rpm and see what they had to do to get it running. Alternatively you could just use their RPM. Personally I have had issues with atrpms(does not play nice with other repos for me) but they do offer a lot of packages that no other repo provides.

edit: http://atrpms.net/dist/el5/vlc/

Thank You Lazlow for the reply...

I checked the link, but there are few options that I can't choose at all as they are compatible with the downloaded tar. Is it like I can use vlc devel, and just through RPM, vlc will work ?? I mean to say, that if I use RPM, then should I use my downloaded tar as well, or not ?

Regards,
Kapil

You have a number of options to choose from.

1. Add the atrpms repo and just yum install vlc. It will install the atrpms vlc (and its dependencies) from atrpms(see note in first post). After that you can just run vlc (no compiling necessary).

2. You can grab atrpms source rpm and just rebuild it on your system.

3. You can grab atrpms vlc.spec(towards the bottom of the linked page) and see what they had to do to build the package for el5. You will see that there were 4 patches required to make this version of vlc run on el5.

4. Ignore what I posted and do something else.

You have to choose one of those option before anyone can help you further.

-devel packages are for compiling other things against the given package. You would need vlc-devel (assuming you do not compile vlc locally) if you wanted to complile an extension for vlc.

Thank you again for the clear suggestion....

I think I need to read something else over the NET, before sending confusing messages to you all. I will try to get some more information to resolve this problem.

Regards,
Kapil

Could you please give us the exact output of

This is generally the way to compile and build from source. Though lazlow says, try finiding a repo with it in, or a package.

James

Take a look at the spec file I linked to. There are at least four patches required and a ton of switches to be set. VLC is a great tool but it is pretty complex. VLC 1 was a huge step forward (VDPAU support) in linux and has added a lot of complexity to the mix. Atrpms is the only el5 repo that I know of the is carrying the newer (1 and above) versions(most others carry the pre 1 versions). This is probably due to two separate things. First, all the complexity added(to an already complex package). Second, if you do not have a series 8 (and a lot of them are not supported) or newer GPU there is very little added value. A lot of the package builders have older hardware(VDPAU unsupported) and cannot really test if what they built actually works. For the vast majority of linux users VDPAU is really not needed. Most have plenty of cpu to run videos using the pre 1 versions. The exception of course is the growing number of atom(and atom equivalent) low power machines. They (generally) cannot successfully use the older versions(not enough cpu).

Hi There,

Thank you for the prompt reply. Here are the outputs of the above said commands :

[oracle@terminal vlc-1.0.6]$ ./configure
checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking host system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking how to create a ustar tar archive... gnutar
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... yes
checking for style of include used by make... GNU
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cl.exe... no
configure: error: in `/home/oracle/Desktop/vlc-1.0.6':
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See `config.log' for more details.


[oracle@terminal vlc-1.0.6]$ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.


[oracle@terminal vlc-1.0.6]$ sudo make install
Password:
Sorry, try again.
(I think I do not have SUDO password for this). So I tried the same with user as ROOT :

[root@terminal vlc-1.0.6]# make install
make: *** No rule to make target `install'. Stop.
[root@terminal vlc-1.0.6]# make INSTALL
make: Nothing to be done for `INSTALL'.


Please let me know if you get some information out of this , so that I can move ahead.

Regards,
Kapil

Well for starters you need a c compiler to compile C.

yum install gcc

Should take care of that issue. Do you have the rest of the dependencies installed already? If not you will need to install them as well. If I remember correctly it is a pretty big list. On an RPM based system in order to compile something against a package (like compiling VLC) you need to have both the package and the -devel version of that package installed.

Hi Lazlow,

I was not getting the repo from Atrpms, so I dumped whole RHEL5 DVD at /var/ftp/pub to create a repository. After that when I rum 'createrepo .' , it gave me error message :

[root@anthurium pub]# ./createrepo .
bash: ./createrepo: No such file or directory

I thought that createrepo wouldn't require any package as such, but it seems that there is some package for createrepo as well. I don't know that whether I am correct or not, so could you please let me know the correct way, and if some package is required then please give me the reference. I am trying to install VLC through YUM now.

Regards,
Kapil

VLC is in Dag Wieers repo, so the easiest way would be to install rpm-forge repository, using these instructions, and after that you can yum install vlc

First, have you registered with RHN (paid for you subscription)? If you are not going to do that, then you should be using a different distro. If you have, then just access RH's repo and install gcc via yum. Depending on the specific RHEL DVD you have, GCC may or may not be on the disk(certain subscription levels do not provide GCC). So check to make sure the GCC rpm is on the disk before you try and build a local repo.

If you do not have a subscription for RHEL then run Centos. Centos is (effectively) the free version of RHEL. Accessing its repos is free(unlike RHEL) and it is 99.9% binary compatible with RHEL(they build it from RHEL scr rpms). This is why most third party rpms are marked el5. They work equally on REHL5 and Centos5.

frrossk

As I point out earlier in the thread most repos (including dag) only carry the pre version 1 vlc. The newest package that Dag has:

vlc-0.9.9a-4.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

See: http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/dag/RPMS/

Hi Frrossk,

I tried DAGs repository, and it seems that it got created but even after this I am not able to use this. The instructions didn't show how to use the repository. Is there any default value that I need to set? At /etc/yum, I am getting two files now :
A) adobe-linux-i386.repo
B) rhel-debuginfo.repo

Is this other adobe repository file is from your suggested DAGs repository?? I am sorry, but I am getting more confused now, so I am thinking of leaving this task for the day.....

Hi LAzlow:
I don't have paid subscription for RHEL here, so its obvious that I can't take GCC from RHN's repository. Its even painful to install Cenros now. Lets see what else can I do to create a workaround for this problem.

Thank you all for the responses till now....

Regards,
Kapil

lazlow:
You're right, I forgot to point that out, thanks for correction

kapilbajpai88:
Check /etc/yum.repos.d, there you'll see a new dag.repo file
To install vlc, run "yum install vlc" as root