I can't seem to find a how-to or guide to multimedia for Slackware 14.2. I just want to be able to watch videos, youtube, netflix, etc. and have the common multimedia functionality that would be expected (I know about the firefox DRM option). The http://slackbuilds.org site has the files needed, e.g. ffmpeg, gStreamer, vlc, etc. and a multitude of libraries for dependencies. However, for someone who does not know about this it is a lot of work and it appears many of the dependencies are for specialized applications. Is it best for a "normal" desktop user to just install Alien Bob's ffmpeg and vlc ~alien/slackbuilds/ or is there an up-to-date guide to selecting the needed libraries and programs?

Thanks

VLC and Firefox -> www.youtube.com gets you watching you're own vids and youtube. pretty simple. netflix?? doesn't it have its own web page too?

for VLC you might want to take the easy way out and install alienbob vlc
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/

its already precompiled. just install it.

so for vlc and youtube no special anything needed, just install vlc and you're playing videos off your hdd or streaming through it as well.

It is not as complicated as you may think.

you just need to know how to operate your mouse and its buttons. right click on a video in your fav file manager, then select open with->vlc.

at the very least you might want to install ffmpeg just for poops and giggles.

if you just happen to have issues with vlc for whatever reason, bounce back in and post them so others can help you learn how to deal with them.

There's a lot of different types of multimedia. But Slackware comes with a lot multimedia apps preinstalled and is able to play just about everything out of the box.

Slackware includes mplayer, which will play just about anything, but it doesn't have a great interface (in fact, by default, it will only show the video with no additional GUI (menus, buttons, etc) and all usage of it needs to be with the keyboard. I use the smplayer frontend to make it extremely user friendly. You can grab the SlackBuild for it on SBo. Slackware also includes xine and a few other players. VLC is a popular one, but it is not included with Slackware (I'll cover that below).

As far as I know, youtube should play fine with firefox as long as you've installed the latest Slackware patches. But I know it works with Chrome without anything special. I personally use forum member ruario's latest-chrome script, which will download the latest chrome, repackage it into a Slackware package, and optionally install it (run it as root with the -i option to install it automatically).

If you want to download youtube videos to watch them later, you can use youtube-dl.

I believe the same goes for Netflix as the above. With the latest firefox, I think it works without issue, however, with the older versions, you needed to spoof your user-agent. Chrome should work without anything extra.

Alien's VLC is self-contained as he included all the required dependencies. He designed the package to not require anything outside of a full Slackware install, so once you grab that package, VLC will work without any other dependencies.

You may not need ffmpeg or other dependencies unless you have some other application that requires it, but Alien did the same with ffmpeg and has it completely self-contained where it doesn't require any additional dependencies.

However, be aware that he is limited in what he can provide on his slackware.com site due to patent restrictions. He has other releases that contain the restricted components on other sites, like slackware.uk. This pertains to both VLC and ffmpeg.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the replies. May I suggest that this information be included on https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:start. What prompted my post was the effort to create a sbopkg queue file for gst-plugins and a similar effort for ffmpeg. You are right that for my case it is best to just download the packages maintained by Alien Bob. However, I have used Slackware for a long time and what I appreciate most about it is the speed, reliability, and simplicity of maintaining it. This leads to a basic maintenance routine with little need to stay abreast of the latest software developments. That used to interest me, but now I mainly want the computer to just work. In the case of multimedia applications there seems to have been a lot of development and naturally some of that is esoteric or specialized. I guess I just haven't looked in the right places for the information. I list my gst-multimedia.sqf file here, which took too long to research and probably contains some useless stuff and omits something necessary. Necessary for what is a fair question. And how does this play with the Alien Bob packages? I figure that if this is a frustration for me, then it probably is for others as well.

Thanks

Do you really use all those packages as separate entities? Or are they mere pre-requisites for a VLC player? Most of your list is already built into my VLC package as statically linked libraries.
Apart from my VLC, then all I would use from your list is gst-plugins-bad, gstlibav, OpenAL and Timidity++.
Slackware-current already contains lame. And even though I don't use flite or ladspa-sdk I see how they can be useful.
See, that is a much shorter list. With comparable power if you use VLC for all your multimedia playback.
I would then add handbrake to record/rip/convert movies.

2 members found this post helpful.

I don't plan to use the packages as separate entities. Many programs bundle their dependencies because that is the only reliable way to have everything working. Looking at the pkg64 VLC package, I see the directory structure to be /lib64/vlc/plugins/ where the the dependency libraries are stored. I think this means that they are statically linked to vlc, as you said, and not available system wide. With the pkg64 ffmpeg, the libav* files are under just /lib64/ which implies they are available system wide, to other programs. For gst-plugins-bad, for example, the build would not use the vlc plugins. So one could not simply install gst-plugins-bad without including some dependencies, like libquicktime. I am sure I will be perfectly happy with the VLC package, but suppose I want to do some video with kdenlive (which I have been thinking about). Then I have another list of dependencies which overlaps. Maybe I should create sbopkg dependency lists for each program and do some kind of "diff" to get an overview.

Thanks

The issue with youtube, dailymotion and vimeo with Firefox is mostly about Flash. If you opt in to -- YouTube-HTML5 -- most will play out of the box on YT. The easiest workaround is to install the older Flash Plugin and set it to ask before loading. VLC is better in some ways but not the monumental problem you see. I find that one of the major advantages of Slackware's PKGTOOLS is that most dependencies are already met not to mention that installing from vanilla source is still always easier than on other distros partly because of that.

Maybe it has to do with what we are used to but since I just recently decided to try out Debian Stretch, I find having to constantly install what I have come to expect to already be there is a total PITA and even minor apps from vanilla source are worse. I'm sorry you're having difficulty but I'm equally certain that in a fairly short time you will discover that Slackware is one of, if not the most, low maintenance distro out AND it doesn't assume I'm an idiot and that the devs know what I want more than me.... or you.

You might want to check out Slackermedia.

Thanks for the link to Slackermedia. It goes a long way in explaining multimedia on Slackware.

Really just using youtube-dl would be far easier...

No need to opt in to anything anymore, youtube and I think the other sites as well started to default to html5 some time ago.
Flash is not really needed nowadays except maybe if you're into some old web games.