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UnixCompile
Contents
Prepare your environment
Get the source
Get the third-party libraries
The preferred method
Debian
OpenSuSE
The "Contrib" method
Regardless of the method
Configuration
Prefix
Compilation
Troubleshooting / common problems
Lua
XCB
Compile fails after git pull
gcc (version 4.9 or later) is recommended, but clang/LLVM are known to work as well.
If you build from the Git repositories, you will also need the GNU build system, also known as the "autotools" (autoconf,
automake, libtool and gettext) to setup the Makefiles. Make sure they are up-to-date and usable for your system.
On Fedora:
On Debian or Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install git g++ make libtool automake autopoint pkg-config flex bison lua5.2
On Arch
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Start by getting the source, using FTP for official releases, or using Git to track VLC development.
If you are using the Git development version, start by bootstrapping the source tree:
If you are using an official release, download source code, extract the archive and go into the resulting VLC directory, e.g.:
$ wget ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/3.0.12/vlc-3.0.12.tar.xz
$ tar xvJf vlc-3.0.12.tar.xz
$ cd vlc-3.0.12
You must install and enable all the necessary underlying libraries. If you fail to install a required library, either the configure
script or (more likely) you will end up with a crippled VLC program. Furthermore keep in mind that whilst build a program (in
this case, VLC), you need to install the development packages (development header files and import libraries), not just the
run-time libraries. On Debian/Ubuntu, the correct package names end with -dev. On RPM distributions, they usually end in
-devel.
Be careful! If the libraries are not provided by your distribution, you may be better off linking VLC with them statically. See
the "Contrib" method.
There are a several ways to get those libraries. You should use only one method at a time:
Debian
For example on Debian or Ubuntu:
OpenSuSE
openSUSE users might have a look at the source-install (si) command in the zypper manpage:
Note: To get the libraries, you must first add the VLC repositories to your system repositories. For example in openSUSE:
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You should replace <openSUSEversion> with the version of your system (12.1, 11.4, 11.3, 11.2 or 11.1)
First, you need to install the GNU autotools (if you have not already done so), CMake, subversion, Git and a recent GNU/tar
utility or equivalent.
$ cd contrib
$ mkdir native
$ cd native
$ ../bootstrap
$ make
That should download and build a lot of those libraries for you. Unfortunately, given the large number of libraries and the
variety of the platforms people build VLC for, it is not unlikely that you will hit an error while contribs are compiling. Thus,
this approach is only recommended for experienced Unix compilers.
Configuration
./configure is used to check whether your system is able to compile VLC. Also you can choose the features in your build.
As a reminder, this command will show the various options:
$ ./configure --help
For most users, ./configure does not require any command-line options.
By default, features to be compiled are chosen automatically depending on what libraries are detected as available. If the
contribs have been compiled first, the resulting VLC will be reasonably functional.
Note that libraries that are not in the default prefix, and not in vlc contribs, must be known to pkg-config in order for
./configure to find them. Use PKG_CONFIG_PATH for this.
There are some features that are disabled (not compiled) by default. If you want them, they must be forced on by using
configure flags. You can find a list of these features by searching for "disabled" in ./configure --help.
Prefix
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$ ./configure --prefix=/path/to/install/folder/
You can find example of configure in the Configure page of this wiki.
Compilation
Compile VLC:
$ make
You do not need to install VLC to use it. You can also simply run it from the build directory:
# ./vlc
If you really want to install VLC to the system, run this as root:
# make install
You can uninstall later with this, but you need to keep the build tree untouched until then:
# make uninstall
$ make clean
Lua
You may need to install Lua if you get "LUA byte compiler missing." message. You namely need to install "luac", the Lua byte
compiler.
On Debian/Ubuntu:
On Fedora:
XCB
VLC 1.1 and later requires XCB libraries to deal with X11 displays. Do not disable XCB or you will not get any video support!
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Under Fedora:
For OpenGL (Debian/Ubuntu only), you will additionally need XLib with XCB:
If your distribution provides a version of XLib without XCB, then this later package will not be available. So you will not be
able to use OpenGL. Use XVideo instead.
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