[FFmpeg-user] ffmpeg issue

[Rodney Baker]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:58:26 Phil Rhodes wrote:
> > You simply have to install the right packages.
> 
> There is a great tendency among linux people to leave things out of
> instructions, and I suspect this is what you are doing here as what you're
> saying simply does not reflect my experience.
> 

Er, no. I was speaking generically rather than distro-specific. The exact 
steps for installing a build environment are distro-dependant. The exact steps 
for building ffmpeg depend on what features/external libraries you want to 
enable in your build and whether or not you want to compile it for the one 
machine (the one you're compiling on), to install on (an)other machine(s), or 
cross-compile for a different platform.

Someone else has already given you the instructions for ubuntu (which I'd 
guess would apply pretty much to most other debian-based distros as well). 

In the case of Fedora and other Red Hat-derived distros, you'd use the 
relevant yum commands to install the build tools and the relevant shared 
libraries and headers.

For openSuSE, this is done through YaST. Selecting the "software development" 
pattern in the YaST Package Manager automatically takes care of the build 
system. Again, you would install the relevant shared libraries and headers and 
then continue from there. Once you have the build system installed (which on 
openSuSE at least was taken care of with a few clicks of the mouse and some 
tiem for downloading and installing to happen automatically), the rest of the 
steps for downloading/configuring/building ffmpeg (and any shared libs not 
provided by the distro) are exactly the same across all distros.


> An environment capable of building ffmpeg, or at least an ffmpeg useful in
> 2011, comprises at least a few thousand files, once you involve
> dependencies, dependencies of dependencies, source, headers, makefiles,
> scripts, configuration, documentation, executables and libraries for
> everything that's required. Each one of those files has to be the right
> version with the right permissions in the right place, correctly referred
> to in other files, creating a thousands-factorial web of potential
> failure, and you furthermore have to worry about which of those files will
> land you in bankruptcy court or prison if you happen to give the
> executable to a friend.

That's what the distro package managers are for (all except the FUD about 
bankruptcy court or prison). 

> 
> Anybody trying to assert that this is in any way trivial or easy is simply
> a fantasist.
> 

More FUD. I did it, so anyone can do it. 

> My direct experience is that it fails much more often than it succeeds.

Building what? On what? For what? How long ago?

-- 
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Rodney Baker VK5ZTV
rodney.baker at iinet.net.au
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