Tuesday 7 July 2009

How-To: Compile and Install VLC 1.0 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope


Ubuntu 9.04 (and Kubuntu) comes with VLC 0.9.9 included in the repositories. However, VLC 1.0.0 was released today and it ships with several new features and many improvements. For readers who don't know what VLC means, it is a powerful, cross-platform and open-source video player, built using Qt 4 toolkit. It supports many video formats and comes with advanced video features and functions.

To install the latest release of VLC (currently 1.0.0) in either Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu distributions, just follow the steps below:

1. Install the needed dependencies
First, use build-dep to get all the dependencies VLC needs. This will also install compilation tools, including the build-essential meta package:

sudo apt-get build-dep vlc

You will need your user password. Notice that on a fresh system this will install a lot of development packages. After the installation is completed proceed to the next step.

Notice: If the buil-dep command fails with a message which goes like E: Build-dependencies for vlc could not be satisfied. then try to install all the packages manually. The following are two separate commands:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libmad0-dev libavutil49 libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libpostproc-dev liba52-0.7.4-dev

sudo apt-get install debhelper dh-buildinfo gettext quilt nasm yasm libass-dev libxul-dev liba52-0.7.4-dev libaa1-dev libasound2-dev libcaca-dev libcdio-dev libdca-dev libdvbpsi4-dev libaudiofile-dev libavahi-client-dev libavcodec-dev libdvdnav-dev libdvdread-dev libesd0-dev libfaad-dev libflac-dev libfreetype6-dev libfribidi-dev libggi2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglib2.0-0 libgnutls-dev libhal-dev libid3tag0-dev libidl0 libimlib2-dev libjack-dev liblircclient-dev liblivemedia-dev liblua5.1-0-dev libmad0-dev libmatroska-dev libmodplug-dev libmpcdec-dev libmpeg2-4-dev libncursesw5-dev libnotify-dev libogg-dev libpng12-dev libpostproc-dev libpulse-dev libqt4-dev libschroedinger-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libv4l-dev libvcdinfo-dev libvorbis-dev libx11-dev libx264-dev libxext-dev libxml2-dev libxpm-dev libxt-dev libxv-dev pkg-config qt4-dev-tools zlib1g-dev

This may take a while.

2. Download the source tarball
Get the source code from the official website (direct link), then make sure the currently working directory is the one where you saved it and uncompress it:

tar -xjf vlc-1.0.0.tar.bz2

3. Compile and install VLC
To compile and install, just issue the usual commands inside the vlc-1.0.0 directory:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Finally, don't forget to run sudo ldconfig with your user password.

You can choose an alternate location for the installation, so you can install as normal user. E.g.:

./configure --prefix=/home/user/usr/
make
make install

VLC 1.0.0 running in Kubuntu 9.04

6 comments:

semko said...

There is no need to compile it. All you have to do is add the repositories, and do install VLC (or update your system if it's already installed).
Just follow the instruction on The VLC site:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ubuntu.html

Anonymous said...

And what about "How to Debian compile vlc 1.0, soon ?

Regards for the wonderful blog

Anonymous said...

Hello

Maybe it could seem a good idea to download "checkinstall" first.

The proceedings then are roughly the same:
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall (instead of make install)

What checkinstall does is to create a neat .deb package and install it at the same time.

Checkinstall keeps a record of all the files that are being added when you install home-compiled software.

This is very useful because your new vlc-custom.deb will be known of your synaptics package manager.

If later on, you decide you want to remove vlc-custom.deb without messing your system, you can use Synaptics to do so.

Sorry for my faulty english. I'm a spaniard living in France.

By the way, did anybody told you VLC was french sofware at the starting of the projetc ?

Alejo

Craciun Dan said...

semko, I finally did that too (after some other complaints) - link here

Anonymous@8:04 - I tried to compile it on Debian Lenny, but it gives an error when running 'make'. Probably something I can fix, so I'll have another look later, when I get the time. There is a tutorial I made in the past, but I think dependencies changed until now (How to compile and install VLC 0.9.8 in Debian Lenny. I'm not sure it works for 1.0 though (I encountered that error). Thanks for the kind words about the blog :)

Anonymous@8:47 - That's cool, but also another way to cleanly uninstall it is to keep the directory vlc-1.0.0/ and perform an sudo make uninstall command. It will have the same effect (as far as I know) as creating a DEB with checkinstall, installing it and then removing it with dpkg -r. Of course, this way that directory can occupy space on the hard drive. French? No, I didn't, but it's good to know :)

Loushon said...

i have no idea where the "vlc" directory is in order to finish installing after I finished compiling.

Craciun Dan said...

It's the same directory and it's called vlc-1.0.0. Just type sudo make install in that directory.

If you're using Ubuntu, the steps are to open GNOME Terminal, uncompress the vlc-1.0.0.tar.bz2 file from where you saved it. For example, if you saved it to Desktop inside your home directory, type:


tar -xjf ~/Desktop/vlc-1.0.0.tar.bz2

cd vlc-1.0.0

./configure
make
sudo make install