VLC on Slackware 12.1
Some time ago I had a lot of problems viewing some H.264 or x264 files.
Apparently, my favorite video player, mplayer does not support the complete
H264 specification, so it has problems with some of the files out there
(reads in the length wrong so you cannot move to, say, middle of the file;
audio and video goes out of sync, etc.)
So I turned to other
solutions. Xine fall flat on face as well, and although ffmpeg plays
it fine it doesn’t have fast forward/rewind and fullscreen option
that is actually usable.
The thing that worked out is VLC,
which I first had to confirm on Windows, since it was much easier to
set it up there. Making it work properly on Slackware was not easy.
After having problems with prebuilt packages, I decided to roll my
own.
I do a lot of wxWidgets development myself, so I used
an already built wx version 2.8.7. VLC compiled, but crashed at
startup (I got segmentation fault with vlc, wxvlc or svlc). I
looked at the website, and it says wx 2.6.3. That one is buggy
unless you patch it (patch is at wx website), so I first tried
with ‘safe’ 2.6.2 which has proven to be rock solid
in the past. However, 2.6.2 doesn’t compile with Slack
12.1’s default GCC 4.2.3, so I went for wx 2.6.4, which
turned out to be a right choice. Just make sure you build wx
in release (not debug) mode, as there are some problems with
wxLog functions and VLC.
Here are the relevant versions
that are compatible:
- Slackware 12.1 (with various media codec for 11.0 and 12.0 installed from linuxpackages.net)
- GCC 4.2.3
- VLC 0.8.6f (—prefix=/usr)
- wxWidgets 2.6.4 (—enable-unicode —disable-debug —disable-shared —prefix=/usr)