VLC 2.1.6 for Dpup Wheezy

[OscarTalks]

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UPDATE - 03rd March 2015
New version 2.1.6 compiled and uploaded.
A few extra plugins added.
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UPDATE - 05th August 2014
New version 2.1.5 compiled and uploaded.
Looking good, improvements include better handling of .mkv files.
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Decided to try compiling VLC in Dpup Wheezy.
Wanted to make it "Standalone" so you can just install and use.
No need to install Qt

Needed Qt Core and Gui libraries along with a few other essential dependencies are included in "non path" directory /usr/share/vlc/libs
These are made available via rpath.

EDIT: 27th May 2014
Re-built and re-uploaded with Lua and several extra libraries.

I am no expert on all the functions of media players, but this one seems to be working for the tasks I would use it for.
Comments and observations welcome.
As always I am just tinkering and trying to learn.

Treat packages as being for testing purposes.
Always take the usual precautions before making any change to your system.
Download from:-
http://smokey01.com/OscarTalks

[bruno]

Nice work Oskar!
Works great on Wheezy 3.5.2.11, and it kept all the settings on the old VLC 2.0.5 that I had.

[vicmz]

I don't know what the terminal result means but it's running fine in Precise 5.7.1 without Qt. Thank you OscarTalks.

[Hesse James]

Hi Oscar
Yours run pretty well on Slacko5.7 too (I prefer the SFS-Version).

I would like to ask you a question concerning your experience:
I intended to see if vlc is capable to use the vdpau acceleration as other media players. The vlc2.2-git version should be capable to do so. This needed a recent vdpau and ffmpeg. I used the following configure switches for vlc:
--enable-run-as-root --enable-vdpau --enable-alsa --enable-lirc
Which did you choose ?

And even more interesting: which LIBs did you install additionally prior to compilation? All recommended or only the ones that were demanded by the make process ?

Greetings
Christian

[OscarTalks]

Hello Christian,

This was my first attempt at compiling VLC but after the first day I did go back to it and added some of those extra libraries and re-compiled and re-uploaded. These included the a52 dolby, mpeg2, opus and a few others which seem quite obscure. I tried to use only static linking. I configured with lua disabled, not sure if that is bad. DejaVu Sans is named as default font, pulse and libnotify are disabled.
I didn't try to include vdpau support. Can this be linked in statically and does it not relate also to graphics drivers? Wheezy has libav in place of ffmpeg. Slacko has ffmpeg, so I would not expect this version to run without problems in Slacko (which has a recent VLC in the repo anyway).
It has played every media file I have thrown at it so far, but then MPlayer does that as well. At some point I will have another look at it and see if there are any improvements I can make. Thanks for your interest.

[phredo]

I installed the sfs file in Slacko 5.6 non-PAE. Most of the films I have are mp4, and when I tried to open several, I received the same message, "No suitable decoder module: VLC does not support the audio or video format "h264". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.," whereupon VLC proceeded to play the audio without any video.

Is there in fact a fix for this? Do others have this problem? I tried looking in the codecs section of the vlc preferences, and the h264 stuff was grayed out. I also tried vlc_full-2.0.3-i686.pet and had the same thing happen.

[OscarTalks]

Hello phredo,

Sorry but I would not expect this VLC package to work properly in Slacko because some of the important libraries are different versions.

In Slacko 5.6 the Gnome-MPlayer should play your mp4 video files.
If it doesn't work you may need to install the fixed MPlayer which 01micko released.
I believe it is this one here:-
http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pe ... 0-i486.pet

There should be a couple of VLC versions available in Puppy Package Manager.
They probably need you to also install Qt or load the Qt .sfs package.
I think VLC 2.1.0 is in there so that is fairly recent and since it was compiled in Slacko most codecs should work.

[phredo]

Thanks, Oscar. With the dependencies all the pups I found take up 300-400 megabytes. Except for the one I mentioned in my post, which is about the size I expect for vlc, but it had the problem with not playing mp4s.

Gnome-mplayer works fine, but there are some features in vlc that I like, such as the ability to play dvds.

[OscarTalks]

@ phredo,

OK, so I took the VLC 2.1.0 and re-packaged it with the needed Qt libs and set rpath to find them.

Perhaps you would care to test this (taking usual precautions before installing) and tell me if it plays your files.

vlc-2.1.0-i686-nodeps-s14
Uploaded as .pet and .sfs to:-
http://smokey01.com/OscarTalks
but I will probably take them down after you have grabbed them.

[phredo]

Thanaks, Oscar. I have to do something else for most of today, but I downloaded the files and will test them as soon as I can, maybe this evening.

[phredo]

I tested your update in a ram bootup, so I'd be sure there weren't any extra files I might have picked up. Both the sfs and the pup worked great, although I only checked them with some mp4 and flv files. I also used vlc to open a DVD in iso form, and that worked also. VLC is one of the few media viewers I know of that can open an iso of a DVD just by loading the file.

It would be nice if that pup could be added to one of the repositories that Puppy Package Manager uses so others would find it. As far as I could tell, the other VLCs there had problems as well as requiring large dependency files. Of course, I'm pretty new with Puppy and linux in general, and don't really know what I'm doing most of the time.

[OscarTalks]

I have re-compiled and re-uploaded VLC 2.1.4 for Wheezy
with the following improvements:-

Added Live 555 support (appears in Preferences but not tested).

Added libebml and libmatroska so files such as .mkv now play properly.

EDIT: 27th May 2014
Re-built and re-uploaded with Lua and libdvbpsi added
Looking pretty good now.
The "no extensions module" error at start in console is now gone.

[Puppus Dogfellow]

Code: Select all

sh-3.00# vlc
VLC media player 2.1.4 Rincewind (revision 2.1.4-0-g2a072be)
[0x80c8270] main demux meta error: corrupt module: /initrd/pup_ro1/usr/lib/vlc/plugins/meta_engine/libtaglib_plugin.so
[0x8051150] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[0x80ee410] skins2 interface error: no suitable dialogs provider found (hint: compile the qt4 plugin, and make sure it is loaded properly)
[0x80ee410] skins2 interface error: cannot instantiate qt4 dialogs provider
Remote control interface initialized. Type `help' for help.

what's this mean and how to fix? i lost vlc two flower installing smplayer and haven't been able to get a working vlc even after uninstalling/reinstalling everything, including trying to have the setup as it was prior to the smplayer installation.

seems pretty clear clear i've screwed something up...

thanks in advance.

[OscarTalks]

Hello Puppus Dogfellow,

Sorry I don't have a definitive answer for you. Is this in Wheezy? All I can tell you is that those plugins plug in (obviously) to the main vlc libraries as needed and then unless they are statically linked plugins they in turn will need to dynamically link to your other system libraries. If those other system libraries have got lost or corrupted then that might be why you are having problems and seeing errors. Try restoring any dependency files from the original .iso or pup_ro2 perhaps.

If you boot Wheezy with pfix=ram and install this VLC you should see that it runs quite well now. I get no errors at start, maybe a few grumbles when you start to play files depending on what they are, but I have tried several media file formats and audio CD's and so far everything has worked. I am no expert in all this though so maybe someone more experienced can shed some light.

[Puppus Dogfellow]

Hello Puppus Dogfellow,

Sorry I don't have a definitive answer for you. Is this in Wheezy? All I can tell you is that those plugins plug in (obviously) to the main vlc libraries as needed and then unless they are statically linked plugins they in turn will need to dynamically link to your other system libraries. If those other system libraries have got lost or corrupted then that might be why you are having problems and seeing errors. Try restoring any dependency files from the original .iso or pup_ro2 perhaps.

If you boot Wheezy with pfix=ram and install this VLC you should see that it runs quite well now. I get no errors at start, maybe a few grumbles when you start to play files depending on what they are, but I have tried several media file formats and audio CD's and so far everything has worked. I am no expert in all this though so maybe someone more experienced can shed some light.

i'm not at the machine at the moment but it's precise 5.5. sorry i forgot to include that detail.

for the record, it's working flawlessly in precise 5.7.1.

will check out your solutions a bit later. thanks for the quick reply, Oscar.

...

where's pup_ro2? i can't find it...

some separate issue isn't allowing me to mount the isos...

anyway, thanks for this. working well in 571 is enough; it's not like it was supposed to work in 5.5. Just figured i'd give it a try.

[OscarTalks]

where's pup_ro2? i can't find it..

This may depend on the type of installation you have, but with live or frugal (which is what I normally use) you should have all the original virgin files under /initrd/pup_ro2

You can copy them out from there or alternatively deleting the overwritten files in the save-file under /initrd/pup_rw will restore by re-exposing the originals in pup_ro2 in the layered file system.

I did do a brief test of this VLC in Precise 5.7.1 myself and it seemed to be working. Glad you are finding the same. I believe Precise has the same libav (ffmpeg) version as Wheezy so that will help. Often stuff compiled in Wheezy will work in Precise but not the other way round because of glibc. I haven't seen this version of VLC for Precise anywhere so perhaps other Precise users would care to give it a test run also, but take the usual precautions if you do.

[Puppus Dogfellow]

where's pup_ro2? i can't find it..

This may depend on the type of installation you have, but with live or frugal (which is what I normally use) you should have all the original virgin files under /initrd/pup_ro2

You can copy them out from there or alternatively deleting the overwritten files in the save-file under /initrd/pup_rw will restore by re-exposing the originals in pup_ro2 in the layered file system.

I did do a brief test of this VLC in Precise 5.7.1 myself and it seemed to be working. Glad you are finding the same. I believe Precise has the same libav (ffmpeg) version as Wheezy so that will help. Often stuff compiled in Wheezy will work in Precise but not the other way round because of glibc. I haven't seen this version of VLC for Precise anywhere so perhaps other Precise users would care to give it a test run also, but take the usual precautions if you do.

so how messed up is it that i haven't got vlc stuff under _ro2? there was a little bit under _ro4. can you explain what the various _ro directories mean/are? thanks in advance.

at this point, "perfecting" this 5.5. set up with my preference for vlc over smplayer isn't a big deal--it works well enough and your vlc is on my "audio player computer" anyway. and now that i know i can hook up my modded-on-ebay (someone was cheaply putting large hard drives in old models a while back and i grabbed a few) zen nomad players to puppy, i have yet another way to access my music library on this machine, so this is as much for educational as practical purposes. i figured i should start asking questions rather than copying and linking what i could find... but it did occur to me to ask something that may be both practical and educational: is there a file or directory i could just copy from the 5.7.1 machine that can run it to the 5.5. machine that can't?

also, i'm loath sometimes to simply reboot, so i might be wasting your time with something that can be solved very easily and apologize in advance for possibly wasting your time.

anyway, thanks for all the stuff i've gotten from you, OscarTalks. it's quite a bit, actually.

[OscarTalks]

Well, I would not expect to see VLC files in pup_ro2 because that is just the original .iso of the Pup. The ones like pup_ro4 are probably your .sfs packages that are loaded. The pup_rw is the save-file which is the top layer I think. This may all depend on your pupmode though.

I was thinking more about the libs that VLC is trying to link to. If you have previously installed something which has overwritten a good lib with a bad one and it is still stuck in there you can restore easily because the good one is always in there in pup_ro2 (it has to be). This would be a bad file covering up a good file of the same name in the layers, so for example, good libxyz in pup_ro2 can be restored by deleting the bad libxyz from pup_rw or by copying the good libxyz from pup_ro2 out into the main system tree.

One of your errors mentioned libtaglib_plugin.so which links to libtag.so.1 in the system so there is one lib to look at for starters to see if it has got lost or corrupted.

[Puppus Dogfellow]

Well, I would not expect to see VLC files in pup_ro2 because that is just the original .iso of the Pup. The ones like pup_ro4 are probably your .sfs packages that are loaded. The pup_rw is the save-file which is the top layer I think. This may all depend on your pupmode though.

I was thinking more about the libs that VLC is trying to link to. If you have previously installed something which has overwritten a good lib with a bad one and it is still stuck in there you can restore easily because the good one is always in there in pup_ro2 (it has to be). This would be a bad file covering up a good file of the same name in the layers, so for example, good libxyz in pup_ro2 can be restored by deleting the bad libxyz from pup_rw or by copying the good libxyz from pup_ro2 out into the main system tree.

One of your errors mentioned libtaglib_plugin.so which links to libtag.so.1 in the system so there is one lib to look at for starters to see if it has got lost or corrupted.

thanks. that clears it up quite a bit.

[OscarTalks]

I have compiled and uploaded version 2.1.5
Improvements include better handling of .mkv files.
Seems to work very well.
See first post.