Also during my holiday, the VideoLAN developers released version 3.0.8 of their VLC media player.
The Release Notes state that this releases provides fixes for several security issues among wich 11 which are CVE-worthy. Meaning that it’s prudent to upgrade your VLC to 3.0.8 soonest.
I have the new packages available (for Slackware 14.2 and -current) in my repository since a couple of days. I used the opportunity to update the following internal libraries as well: bluray, dav1d, ebml, and matroska.
You will also probably note that there is no “npapi-vlc” package. I decided to retire this VLC based NPAPI webbrowser plugin from my repository. Modern browsers are all moving away from NPAPI plugin support, and relying on HTML5 instead. Chrome/Chromium always only supported PPAPI based plugins anyway.
A note about dependencies for the VLC 3.x packages:
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, its interface has switched from Qt4 to Qt5.
While Slackware 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, qt5. Hopefully Qt5 will get added to Slackware-current sometime in the future.
On Slackware 14.2, two more packages are needed – they have already been incorporated into Slackware-current: libinput and libwacom .
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 .
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/ and http://slackware.uk/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), mirrored at http://slackware.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .
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.
Have fun! Eric
Hi Eric, thanks for all of thise weekend’s updates!
There seems to be some leftover packages in your -current repos, I have found:
npapi-vlc-20171129-x86_64-1 in alienbob and restricted (obsoleted)
OpenAL-1.19.1-x86_64-1 in alienbob (OpenAL-1.19.1-x86_64-2 in ktown)
qrencode-3.4.4-x86_64-1 in alienbob (qrencode-4.0.2-x86_64-1 in ktown)
BTW, since you retired npapi-vlc I’m assuming it should be OK to delete my currently installed package (npapi-vlc-20190112-x86_64-1alien), right?
Cheers!
When installing the package, installpkg have hung “in the end”, I tried two times, and I needed to do a CTRL+C to stop it. The package is installed because I checked the version, also I found two package-vlc into my root system.
THanks! No problems on my end with the package. Missed that it was updated until I saw this. Heh.
The compilation fails if you have ffmepg 4.2 aom enable.
When building with aom, the build fails with:
codec / aom.c: 99: 23: error: use of undeclared identifier \’AOM_IMG_FMT_444A\’
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-ports-head/2018-September/188579.html
\”multimedi /aom is a new hidden dependency, that is, automatically collected for runtime if installed. \”
It doesn\’t fail if you add –disable-aom
to the configuration
regards
lupox
And if you want to fix this, you can follow the link in here to the patches: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233063
Yes, I had already seen them. If you have ffmpeg 4.2.1 installed. They are necessary even if you build static ffmpeg.
I’ll simply add “–disable-aom” then. My VLC does not use aom for AV1 video decoding anyway. I opted to use VideoLAN’s own ‘dav1d’ decoder instead.
Thanks for the release.
Everything works as expected.
But there’s one little problem. In some random videos, when I hit the close button,
it stays in the system try, and there’s no way to close the program, or play another video.
I just have to kill its process.
However, closing the app using the Ctrl+Q shortcut, works perfectly.
system tray
Sounds like a VLC bug. You could report that via their bug tracker https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/
Hey, thanks a lot for the release, it’s been amazing! Unfortunately, recently it stopped working on slackware64-current. Looks like libidn got updated and now vlc crashes at launching with `vlc: error while loading shared libraries: libidn.so.11: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory`. I tried to download your slackbuild scripts and build it locally so it links to the new version of libidn, but it failed during compilation with an error saying that opencv requires c++11 enabled during compilation. I am still trying to dig out which package compilation failed, but the script is quite long. I would also really appreciate if you can possibly meanwhile have a look at it cause you will probably figure it out in no time. Thanks a lot!
Nikolay, I have no issues with vlc. Something must be wrong on your system. Like yours, my Slackware64-current contains /usr/lib64/libidn.so.12 and my vlc binary links against that library.
Perhaps you have some other software installed which vlc tries to link to, and that other software still links against the older libidn.so.11. Or… you installed the vlc package for Slackware 14.2 which does indeed link against libidn.so.11.
Yes, you were right, I had misconfigured slackpkg+ to point to 14.2 rather than current. Works properly now. Thanks a lot!