Slackware 13.0 with full multimedia capabilities?
 

I am in the process of setting up my wonderful Slackware system on my laptop, and now I would like to make sure I am able to run as much multimedia as possible (to be up to snuff in this realm with Mac and Windows users). I am running Slackware x86_64 version 13.0 with a full install (but only with the software sets A, AP, D, F, K, KDE, L, N, X, XAP, Y) and have installed flash-player-plugin from slackbuilds.org.

Recently I stumbled upon this website: http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/sdeg/multimedia.htm

It explains precisely what I would like to know: which packages should I install to get a fully-featured multimedia Slackware install (and in which order should I build/install these packages to take care of dependencies). I emailed the author to make sure this guide was up to date with Slackware 13, but, sadly, it is not. It seems that Mr. Anderson uses Slackware 12.2, and thus there may be inconsistencies between what this guide explains and what works on the newest Slackware. For example, mplayerplug-in has been depreciated in favor of gecko-mediaplayer. I need to know if more of this has happened. I would simply test it myself, but I have been distro-hopping reinstalling repeatedly over the past few weeks for various reasons, and I am trying to avoid dirtying up my system too much and having to reinstall yet again.

So I ask of you, does Mr. Anderson's list apply to Slackware 13.0, or are there any changes that need to be made? I ask because someone here may have already used this guide and may be willing to share their knowledge and experience on it. Eric's VLC Slackbuild is very interesting, and I plan to run that, so VLC and its dependencies are covered.

My multimedia needs are not too demanding, but I do expect web media to work flawlessly. I often visit www.apple.com and watch movie trailers, guided tours, etc., so I need quicktime videos on the web to work. YouTube and online flash games already work fine with flash-player-plugin. I also visit some web sites that have windows media formats being streamed (.wmv and .wma).

Thanks in advance for any help. It is greatly appreciated.

One useful tip is to have a close look at the build script for MPlayer in Slackware 13.0 and consider rebuilding using USE_PATENTS=YES to create a fuller copy, if this is legal in your part of the world. Another small tip is to go to slackbuilds.org and pick up a build script for SMPlayer which is a vastly superior frontend for MPlayer.

Andrew

I followed that tutorial and it worked. I also rebuilt Mplayer as suggested in the previous post. The author of that page is an LQ member btw. I would recommend sbopkg to make your life easier if you choose to go that route since it will allow you make a build queue and install packages in order. There were a few bumps in the road, but nothing I can think of that didn't work although most of my media use is limited to an occasional dvd, pandora, and whatever videos on the web.

Awesome. What are these bumps along the road, damgar? What do I have to do to avoid/overcome them?

Thanks for telling me about the MPlayer rebuild, andrew.46.

My bumps likely won't be your bumps. I think mine were relating to slackware-current and it's newer gcc/glibc packages. For the most part it was updating versions and things of that nature.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ltilib-781053/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...titles-781377/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...urrent-781270/

These threads document some of my troubles and the solutions that worked for me.

I've always found Alien Bob to be a good resource:

http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/

In sbopkg website there is a queue file that could help compiling multimedia packages for slack 13 with sbopkg. I haven't used this but it shouldn't hurt to try.

That queue file looks like what I need. It's even been tested on Slackware 13.0! I think I'm going to use that.

Then, I'll rebuild MPlayer with USE_PATENTS="YES"


I don't know if I should get Eric's VLC SlackBuild since that installs all the dependencies, and some of those are the same packages as those found in this queuefile. Would that cause any problems, or can these packages exist side by side (or will the SlackBuild just use the installed packages?).

I'm using Eric's VLC. My slackware computer is terribly old - 3 hours to compile webkit from the slackbuilds for example ;) Eric's prebuilt binaries are awesome when you need it now

I really don't know answer to that question, but my guess is if vlc slackbuild installs also dependencies, then later in sbopkg when processing or viewing the queue there's the button "Clear ins'd" (Clear installed), which will unselect already installed packages so they would not be recompiled and upgraded.

I installed Eric's VLC SlackBuild successfully, but it's still missing some things that are in the multimedia queuefile. Clear inst'd doesn't find all of the packages installed with the VLC SlackBuild, and I tried manually removing them by checking vlc.SlackBuild and removing those items from the queue, but that only causes dependency problems. Right now I'm building the complete multimedia queue.

After that's all done, I'll test out some websites and maybe a DVD to see what works and what doesn't (I hope it all works!). I'll post with the results.

Well I'm done with all that, and now the Get a Mac ads on apple.com do not recognize libquicktime; they say it's required and offer to download it. The same occurs with the movie trailers on that site. YouTube works just fine, but that's just flash. WMV streaming works just fine. Songza and Pandora work perfectly. I haven't tested any DVDs yet because I can't find any in my house right now (I usually buy movies from iTunes or something). Let me know if there are any other cool sites I should test.


How do you get the apple.com quicktime videos to work? All of them are still saying I need to install quicktime when I installed Eric's VLC SlackBuild and ran the multimedia queuefile from sbopkg.org!

Also, I went into Firefox preferences > Applications to see if I could set the default application for some of these formats, but no multimedia formats are shown! There's nothing but mailto, irc, podcasts, and webcal! Usually I see a huge list of media formats. Surprisingly, only shows Shockwave Flash and Java. I guess Firefox isn't recognizing any of the newly-installed codecs. Do I have to rebuild it? What's wrong?

Note: http://straightedgelinux.com/

Damn, come sooner next time! I don't know how well this will work, but I've got the huge queuefile running now. There are a lot of packages that the other methods missed. Hopefully this will fix the problems I'm having. Again, I'll post back with a status report later.

I cannot play quicktime videos from apple.com, too. I never really missed it, but it should be something to do with browser plugin installed to handle these types of video - mplayerplugin or gecko-mediaplayer, kmplayer. Maybe browsers also have to be configured to use these plugins, i don't know.

I hope someone with more knowledge about this would step in to guide you.

This vlc slackbuild probably builds package of vlc with libraries statically linked, no need to edit slackbuild or worry about duplicate dependencies. Check the contents of created vlc packages - all libraries is installed in custom directory '/usr/lib64/vlc'.

---

Thanks for a link to this huge howto, rockslinux! I hope i can use this to build my first realtime kernel.