Month: December 2021 (Page 2 of 2)

I have uploaded packages for VLC 3.0.16. I have not been paying much attention to VideoLAN development in 2021, as I was busy enough with other stuff and my VLC player did everything it needed to. But it was time (after 11 months) to come with a new set of packages for Slackware.

Between the previous 3.0.7 and this 3.0.16 release I updated some of the vlc packages’ internal libraries too: bluray, dav1d, dvdnav, dvdread, dvdcss, ebml, libva, matroska, opus, pcre2, speexdsp, ssh2 and vpx. I also added patches to the internal ffmpeg that fix crashes in MPEG2 DXVA playback.

A note about dependencies for the new package:

My Slackware packages for VLC are mostly self-contained with all of the supporting libraries compiled into the package. This makes for a minimal dependency on external libraries/packages. But there are some caveats with the new release: most importantly, it has a Qt5 user interface.
While Slackware 14.2 contains a ‘qt4’ package, it does not contain ‘qt5’ and therefore, the vlc-3.x package introduces some new external dependencies, all related to the Qt5 GUI: SDL_sound, OpenAL, libxkbcommon, libinput, libwacom, qt5.
On Slackware -current (pre 15.0 now) no dependency packages are needed; everything the vlc package needs is present in Slackware-current.

A note on compiling:

When you want to compile VLC 3 yourself, be sure to install java8 and apache-ant or your build will fail.
If you are running Slackware 14.2 you will additionally need the following four packages (required to compile the ‘dav1d‘ decoder): meson, ninja, python3, python3-setuptools. You will also need a newer nasm than Slackware 14.2 provides.

Where to find the new VLC packages:

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ (only containing the versions that do not violate US patents).
  This repository is mirrored at https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ .
  If you want to play encrypted DVD’s please install the libdvdccss package separately.
• https://slackware.nl/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/
  (alternative repository containing packages capable of AAC encoding and encrypted DVD playback).

Rsync access is offered by the mirror server: rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

For BluRay support, read a previous article for hints about the aacs keys that you’ll need.

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode AAC audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.