How-To: Compile and Install VLC 0.9.8 in Debian Lenny

Posted by Chris7mas on Mar 24, 2009 5:54 PM EDT
Tux Arena; By Craciun Dan
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VLC (VideoLAN Client) is one of the most popular video players on Linux, together with players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine. It plays many audio and video formats (including Xvid, DivX, H.264, Theora, WMV, Real Video, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, APE, AC3, WAV) together with DVDs and DVD ISO images. The version which comes included in the Debian Lenny repositories is 0.8.6h, which uses the wxWidgets kit and it is kind of outdated now. The latest release of VLC is 0.9.8a, which is now built in Qt 4 and includes several improvements over the 0.8.x series.

VLC (VideoLAN Client) is one of the most popular video players on Linux, together with players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine. It plays many audio and video formats (including Xvid, DivX, H.264, Theora, WMV, Real Video, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, APE, AC3, WAV) together with DVDs and DVD ISO images.

The version which comes included in the Debian Lenny repositories is 0.8.6h, which uses the wxWidgets kit and it is kind of outdated now. The latest release of VLC is 0.9.8a, which is now built in Qt 4 and includes several improvements over the 0.8.x series.

VLC 0.9.8a running in Debian Lenny

To compile this release from source you can follow the steps below:

1. Install the tools needed for compilation
As root, type:

apt-get install build-essential

build-essential is a meta package which includes tools like gcc or make, needed to compile source code.

2. Install the dependencies
The following command will install the development libraries which are needed for the compilation:

apt-get install libqt4-dev libpostproc-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libmad0-dev

3. Fetch the source tarball
Download the VLC 0.9.8a source tarball from here, then uncompress it:

tar -xjf vlc-0.9.8a.tar.bz2

4. Compile and install VLC
To compile VLC, just change the working directory to vlc-0.9.8a and issue the following commands:

./configure --disable-swscale make make install

The last one as root.

Configuration

You can also install VLC as normal user by specifying a prefix, i.e.:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr/ --disable-swscale

In this case you can issue make install as normal user. Also make sure to include /home/USER/usr/bin in your $PATH.

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