Can't install mencoder
 

Hi everyone,

I'm running
geoff@aragorngardens:~$ uname -a
Linux aragorngardens 2.6.18-6-686 #1 SMP Fri Dec 12 16:48:28 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

From the regular debian repositories I can install mplayer, but it doesn't seem to come with mencoder (i.e. I can run mplayer, mencoder shows up in the man page, but running mencoder gives a

bash: mencoder: command not found

This is probably no surprise to most. If I add debian-multimedia.org to my sources.list then I can find mencoder. When I try to get I have the error:

aragorngardens:/etc/apt# apt-get install mencoder
---------------------snip------------------------
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mencoder: Depends: libavcodeccvs51 (>= 3:20070329) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libavformatcvs51 (>= 3:20070329) but it is not going to be installed


OK, so to see what's up with that I try

aragorngardens:/etc/apt# apt-get install mencoder libavcodeccvs51 libavformatcvs51
------------------------snip-------------------------------
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libavcodec51 libavdevice52 libavformat52 libvlc0 vlc vlc-nox

Aack! Why does it want to remove vlc??

Anyway, I've tried this a few times, letting it remove vlc (I reinstall it later). But every time I seem to run into a sequence of unresolvable dependencies. It seems to want:

libavcodeccvs51 libavutilcvs49 libavformatcvs51 libpostproccvs51

But when I tell it to install them I get things like:

Unpacking libpostproccvs51 (from .../libpostproccvs51_3%3a20070329-0.0etch1_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libpostproccvs51_3%3a20070329-0.0etch1_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/lib/libpostproc.so.51', which is also in package libpostproc51
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libavutilcvs49_3%3a20070329-0.0etch1_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libpostproccvs51_3%3a20070329-0.0etch1_i386.deb

I'm afraid this doesn't mean much to me. Help?

I'm not too familiar with Debian, but when I come accross this issue in Fedora, it can usually be resolved by finding a different repository, or finding the corresponding source package and building the package from source.

libavcodeccvs51 provides the same functionality as libavcodec51, which is why its going to remove it. It looks as if its trying to install CVS versions, which means removing the existing ones.

Have you tried the MPlayer site? They usually have pre-built binaries there.

" mencoder " ( and a lot of other software ) is in
the ' debian-multimedia.org repository '

http://debian-multimedia.org/dists/l...e/mencoder.php

http://debian-multimedia.org/ QUOTE :
First download the debian-multimedia-keyring package.
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/poo....10.16_all.deb
.....

where is mencoder
 

This may be way too late to be of any concern to anyone now, if so "forget about it" ;-)

I was having the same kind of grief, but read that mencoder comes with mplayer. I got the mplayer tarball (suggest you get the tar.gz one, I got the tar.xz one first and completely failed to untar it), extracted and built (had to apt-get install yasm I think, but that went smoothly), generating a directory called MPlayer-1.1. The binaries for mplayer and mencoder are in that directory.
I copied them to /usr/bin so the path is automatically supplied, i.e. I can just type mplayer or mencoder regardless of the current working directory. If your default path is something else then copy them there.
uname -r 2.6.26-2-amd64

/Paul