Today, the archive was updated with new versions of a few multimedia-packages:
- Ffmpeg 0.5+svn20090706-2. A backport from Unstable, only WITH libx264 support and a few more codecs enabled, that are normally disabled in Debian (in lenny-custom)
- Libass 0.9.7-3. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)
- Liboil 0.3.16-1. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)
- Liblivemedia 2008.07.25-2. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)
- Schroedinger 1.0.7-2. Backport from Unstable with no modifications (in lenny-backports)
The goal of this exercise was, to build recent VLC packages with libx264 support. However, building VLC on Lenny provides a challenge, because the build fails with this error:
configure: error: Buggy GNU/libc (version 2.5 – 2.7) present. VLC would crash; there is no viable work-around for this. Check with your distribution vendor on how to update the glibc run-time. Alternatively, build with –disable-nls –disable-mozilla and be sure to not use LibVLC from other applications/wrappers.
Indeed, the installed version of libc6 is 2.7-18. Unstable contains 2.9-26 at the moment of writing.
I guess I willt try to follow the instructions from the error message and build VLC with –disable-nls –disable-mozilla. Fortunately, there are no packages in Debian that depend on LibVLC.
For now, all packages are available for amd64 only.
Update September 21st, 23:08:
VLC packages are now also available. My changelog entry is as follows:
vlc (1.0.1-2~tzz50+1) unstable; urgency=low
* Packaged for Lenny
* Enabled libx264 support:
- debian/control: build-depends: libx264-dev, added
- debian/vlc-nox.install: added usr/lib/vlc/codec/libx264_plugin.so
* Disabled NLS support:
- debian/rules: –disable-nls
- debian/vlc-data.instal: removed usr/share/locale
* Disabled Mozilla plugin:
- debian/rules: –disable-mozilla
- debian/control: removed the mozilla-plugin-vlc package and deleted all references to it
* Disabled pulseaudio support, because it requires a (too) recent version:
- debian/rules: –disable-pulse
- removed build-dep on libpulse-dev
- removed vlc-plugin-pulse package from debian/control
So, libx264 support was added, Native Language Support and the Mozilla plugin were disabled because of compilation problems. Furthermore, the PulseAudio output plugin was disabled, because apparently, VLC needs a newer PulseAudio library than the one available in Lenny. Backporting PulseAudio 0.9.17 from Unstable is certainly an option, but unfortunately, that package has several build-dependencies, that are unfulfillable in Lenny, requiring more backports. So this time, I chose the easy way out and disabled Pulse altogether. I’m sorry if that makes my VLC build unusable for you. For everyone else: I hope you enjoy it.
Update September 22nd:
All packages now available for i386, too.
