Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: vlc (Page 4 of 9)

Packages for LibreOffice 3.6.5, calibre and steamclient, and lots of movement on the horizon

February 2, 2013 / / 20 Comments

Yes, I finally got rid of the flu – but it took a week. I lost some weight (and I am not overweight so I am looking starved now), I still have a bad cough and my lower back muscles are strained and painful because of the continuous coughing. Otherwise I am fine.

I had a bit of a Slackware backlog which I am getting rid of now, thanks to my automated build scripts (creating these packages took time, not effort).

LibreOffice

The Libre Office developers had published their 3.6.5 release last week, and I finally felt good enough to build packages. I did a quick examination and it appears that the opening/saving of password-protected files is finally working! Other bugfixes are documented in the release notes. That shows a fairly long list, let’s hope 3.6.5 is going to be rock stable for everyone. It is the last 3.x release before moving on to 4.0.0 in February.

These LibreOffice 3.6.5 packages have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well, but there seem to be some dynamic linking errors, so I assume that some functionality is broken. I have not yet found where that happens, though. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me.

The next series, 4.x ,will be compiled on Slackware 14.0 and that will be the end of the library errors in any case. Modifying the libreoffice.SlackBuild script for the 4.x release required real effort! I am running LibreOffice 4.0.0_RC2 here on the desktop machine and it will be worth it, I promise. I will wait with making my new packages public until the official stable 4.0.0 release, so be patient for now please… Those who are still on Slackware 13.37 will have a good fallback choice with LibreOffice 3.6.5.

Downloads are available here, as usual:

Remember, you can add more functionality by installing extensions. LibreOffice extensions are available from http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

steam

Steam client

I also updated my steamclient package with a re-packaging of Valve’s latest binary release (a debian package for Ubuntu actually): 1.0.0.22. I am going to write a separate blog entry about Steam this weekend so I am not lingering here too long. Rest assured that the new package will rid you of the annoying “outdated client” errors and works like a charm (mostly).

calibreico

Calibre Ebook Management

And I am again in line with the weekly updates of Kovid Goyal, developer of Calibre. I still maintain an up-to-date version of my custom-built package because I think it is an important tool for anyone with an E-Reader who does not want to tie his hands to a commercial ebook management & library system. Calibre acts as my family’s library and using OPDS protocol, I do not even need a cable to download new books onto the reader. I just use the wireless network.

The Event Horizon!

The blog’s subject hinted that more is coming.. Indeed I already have my packages ready for KDE 4.10.0 but I am not yet releasing them yet… I am waiting for the official announcement next week (and maybe other packagers will find bugs in the meantime). It is looking cool and I am running it here with no issues. In fact I played several hours of Half-Life Deathmatch against my son (there’s a Linux Beta of that too, since this week on Steam – well worth the 10 bucks), and neither the new KDE nor Steam nor Half-life crashed. Also imminent is a new release of IcedTea, the build framework for OpenJDK which I use. That means, there will be a Slackware package for OpenJDK “7u12” or somewhat like that, very soon.

And last but certainly not least, the VideoLAN developers (who are currently partying at FOSDEM, Brussels) will have to come up fast with a fix for a critical vulnerability in the VLC player, which was divulged yesterday… I guess that you should not be opening ASF files in the meantime.

Eric

Finally, VLC 2.0.4

October 18, 2012 / / 23 Comments

The fifth release in the “TwoFlower” series of the VLC media player is ready. Version 2.0.4 is said to be “a major update that fixes a lot of regressions, issues and security issues in this branch. It introduces Opus support, improves Youtube, Vimeo streams and Blu-Ray dics support. It also fixes many issues in playback, notably on Ogg and MKV playback and audio device selections and a hundred of other bugs.” – quoting the VideoLAN news page.

You can find some additional information on the release notes page. There I saw the new “ogg opus” support mentioned for the first time. OggOpus is a low-latency audio codec optimized for both voice and general-purpose audio. This was new to me so it did not get added to this set of Slackware VLC packages. I promise I will see if I can include it in my next set of packages. The new release also has fixed the playback of Youtube videos. Google changes its Youtube access protocol regularly, probably in an attempt to frustrate non-official ways of watching their videos. Luckily the Youtube video support is implemented as a Lua script so even for the older VLC 2.0.3 package, I was able to fix it without much effort a few weeks ago by downloading an updated youtube.lua file from the source code repository.

Again, it took quite a while to get a new version of VLC stamped and the sources released to the public. Judging from the discussions on IRC, the developer team seem to have a fundamental internal disagreement about how to set goals for a release. It is obvious (if you read between the lines of the release notes) that the focus of the development effort between 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 has been on the Windows and Mac platforms with additional focus on the new Android platform (did you try the Android app yet? I like it). This does not mean that there is nothing new to report for the Linux users. The number of general improvements is equally impressive. There is also talk of “security fixes” but so far I was not able to find a CVE reference.

I have been making preparations for the compilation of new VLC packages a while ago. Remember that I have to create 8 VLC packages when VideoLAN developers release a new version of their player (two Slackware releases, two architectures per release, and then restricted/unrestricted versions of each) so I use tarballs of pre-compiled “contribs” binaries to speed up the process. The contribs (which is how VideoLAN calls them) are actually the set of supporting libraries which provide the real functionality in VLC – playback, encoding, hardware support, etc. I compiled a set of these contribs two weeks ago for Slackware 14, and more than a month ago for Slackware 13.37. Several of those internal supporting libraries were updated with regard to my previous vlc-2.0.3 packages: Shout, aacenc, amrwbenc, amr, lua, upnp, v4l, x264; and for Slackware 14.0 I added two more: ffmpeg and live555.

A further update to the vlc.SlackBuild (only relevant should you attempt to rebuild VLC from source) is the fact that it no longer needs to compile and use an internal Mozilla SDK. Slackware’s own seamonkey package in 14.0 (and the version of seamonkey for Slackware 13.37 which you can install from its/patches/packages directory) is now capable of compiling the Mozilla-compatible webbrowser plugin package “npapi-vlc”. Not having to compile the Mozilla SDK speeds up the total build time a lot.

One remark about npapi-vlc: I still use the 2.0.0 release tarball since that is the most recent one that you can download. However, a version 2.0.2 was tagged in the source repository a few months ago. It’s just that the developer did not create an official tarball for that, and therefore I stick to the older version.

The release notes speak of improved BluRay support in this release. Note that the BluRay support in VLC (at least in my package) works only for unencrypted disks… and I do not think these exist actually. But extracted unencrypted BluRay files on your hard drive should playback just fine.  Playback of encrypted BluRay DVD’s requires that you also install my libaacs package: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libaacs or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libaacs/) and find yourself a set of AACS decryption keys (see these comments for some hints on that).

Time to download the new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

Have fun! Eric

Back from holidays, some package updates

July 25, 2012 / / 20 Comments

Just came back from a short stay in Brittany, France where we stayed in a mobile home. Lots of sun, and lots of sleep to catch up on while being there!

While I was gone enjoying some freedom, interesting things happened in computerland. Slackware’s development reached the “Slackware 14 Beta 1” mark (see the “Sun Jul 22 22:38:36 UTC 2012” entry in the current ChangeLog). And the VideoLAN developers released an update to the VLC player. I am sure that there were other things that will grip me when I read them, but I have not been home long enough to notice 🙂 In the meantime, you may want to read about a man and his software which I do not care to see getting a grip on Slackware: systemd and slackware’s future … just to keep you focused on what’s good and what’s evil.

First Slackware of course.

The “Beta 1” update was pretty huge, as it involved the introduction of XFCE 4.10 and all the dependencies that required. The changes of “Wed Jul 25 02:02:40 UTC 2012” have fixed some of the expected fall-out which results from big and intrusive updates in slackware-current. It should be safe for all you beta testers out there to play with this Beta. But please make sure that you start with upgrading the “slackpkg” package and then run “slackpkg update” again!

I took the opportunity to refresh my set of pre-converted multilib packages for slackware64-current, and added “l/libffi” to the “massconvert32.sh” script (part of my own compat32-tools package) since people were noticing an error about missing libffi during the boot of a multilib slackware64-current system.

Then VLC.

I quickly built new packages for the 2.0.3 release which I have already uploaded. This is not a spectacular update, mostly beneficial to OS/X users and also refreshing a lot of UI translations. Note that I maintain the usual split in “restricted” and “unrestricted” functionality: the packages which I host on slackware.com are not able to encode MP3 and AAC audio (that version of my VLC package is of course perfectly able to play back those audio formats) due to software patent restrictions which apply in the US. For un-crippled packages you should head over to any mirror which carries the “restricted_slackbuilds” repository, like http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/ .

Have fun!

Eric

 

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also uploaded a new version of Calibre – the weekly update cycle was broken because of my holidays. If you use an “old” version of Calibre and do not want it to quit every week when it checks for updates and finds a new version, you can simply disable that check for new releases.

VLC 2.0.2

June 30, 2012 / / 13 Comments

Another (bugfix) release of the VLC media player is ready. The time between this release and the previous 2.0.1 was longer than usual, due to a recent fall-out between several of the core developers. For a while, it looked like the VideoLAN project’s existence was doomed when their most important Linux developer quit the team out of frustration. However he re-joined, and the dust has settled again.

The VideoLAN web site still does not have an official blurb about the 2.0.2 release, two days after making it available, so I decided to mention it on my blog without waiting any further.

For this vlc-2.0.2 package, I also updated several of the internal libraries (ffmpeg, x264, lame, bluray and upnp). Note that the BluRay support in VLC (at least in my package) works only for unencrypted disks. Unencrypted BluRay disks are pretty rare birds. Playback of encrypted BluRay DVD’s requires that you also install my libaacs package: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libaacs or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libaacs/) and find yourself a set of AACS decryption keys (see these comments for some hints on that).

This is where you’ll find the new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

Have fun! Eric

Note 01-jul-2012: The release notes for vlc-2.0.2 have been published on the VideoLAN web site.

End of may ramblings

May 31, 2012 / / 22 Comments

It has been a while since my latest blog post, so I thought it would be good to talk a bit about the goings-on.

First about the Slackware web server. I know, people, that we have been without http://www.slackware.com/ for a few weeks now, but rest assured that the site will eventually be back. Either we put the old web site code on a temporary server or we wait a little longer and publish a new site based on a new CMS. It all pretty much depends on how much time we can volunteer for this – it is mostly handled by a few people in the coreteam. Pat should focus on Slackware and make sure we get a new stable release at some point – there is a lot to do still on that front.

And then about my own packaging activities.

There was a new release of LibreOffice yesterday, and I am currently building packages for that. If there are no issues with the build then you can expect those packages tomorrow.

KDE release team is in the process of releasing the first beta of KDE SC 4.9, and I intend to make packages for that. There was a heated discussion about this beta when the new release manager announced he was going to call off the beta1 release… but all issues have been resolved yesterday and new tarballs are going to be made available ahead of time to the packagers. There are quite a few changes compared to KDE 4.8.x so it will cost me a while to work out the updates to the KDE.SlackBuild framework.

I also hope that VLC releases their version 2.0.2 soon. It has been lingering just around the corner for a while, but a recent fall-out between several of the core developers threatened the whole project’s existence when their most important Linux developer quit the team out of frustration. That animosity has now subsided, the team is whole again, and development is progressing toward a new release.

I also want to thank the kind people who donated a few bucks after all the upheavals about the Slackware webserver’s outage. Although I work on Slackware in my spare time, because I like it, it’s my main hobby so to speak, getting some funds enabled me to buy a new and faster build box last year, and now I ordered a Raspberry-Pi (finally…) and I am also looking for a good tablet which allows the installation of a different OS than only Android… so that I can put my unfinished port of Slackware to modern ARM architectures on it and finally release that. A release does not make sense if it runs on only one device (the Trim Slice). Perhaps I will buy some more ARM hardware too. Even Pat was becoming excited about this ARM port.

Eric

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