Building a MultiMedia Machine with Slackware 12.2
by Lenard Spencer
(NOSPAMlenardNOSPAM_AT_lenardspencer_DOT_com)

Revision 2009-11-08
(updates, corrections, and omissions)

NOTE: This howto was written before I embraced the use of Slackbuilds, but it is kept here more for archival purposes than anything else.
This is the first tutorial I've tried to write in a LLOOOONNNGGG time, so please, if I confuse any of you, just shoot me an email and I'll try to clarify it.  Here we are going to turn a virgin Slackware 12.2 install into a versatile multimedia station.  While you can download prebuilt packages from linuxpackages.net, I have found that some of the later packages were linked with libraries the package creators had on their systems at the time, which we probably won't have on ours yet, and if we do, they are more than likely a different version than what the package expects, in which case the program will simply bomb out because it can't find the right libraries.  For this reason we will be installing our libraries and programs from source.  These are the steps I took and documented, and they should work for you as well.  So grab a drink (PLEASE keep it covered, you're at the computer!) and let's get ready to roll.

UPDATE: This HOWTO is meant for those of you who will be dedicating a Slack partition strictly to multimedia. I will be soon posting another version using Slackbuilds, which a lot of you may find a little more appealing.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

First, I HIGHLY recommend a fast computer.  Because we are working with a 32-bit Slackware, it may or may not make a difference if your processor is 32 or 64 bit.  Either way, any system with a processor speed slower than 2 GHz and a front-side bus (FSB) speed slower than 400 MHz is probably not a good candidate, especially if you will be working with file sizes measured in GIGS, like DVDs.  Also, I HIGHLY recommend a Geforce video card over ATI, based on previous experience with ATI's Linux driver totally trashing my system and making me spend DAYS reinstalling everything.  If your luck is better than mine, then by all means stick with it.

Oh, yeah.  Before I forget, it helps tremendously that you have a LOT of hard drive space available, especially since we will be building a system to work with large video files.  You may think that 40 gigs is enough, but you'd be amazed at just how fast a 40 gig partition fills up!

That said, let's get to it!

NOTE ON SLACKWARE 13.0

As of version 13.0, Slackware now includes MPlayer, which was built with the "USE_PATENTS=NO" paramater, which means it was built without features that are covered by patent issues, like faac, mp3lame, and dvdcss (among others).  As I have not done a whole lot with 13.0 as of this writing, I cannot offer any suggestions as of yet, except to possibly uninstall the included MPlayer package and build your own as outlined later in this tutorial.  I personally consider 13.0 a "not quite ready for prime time" version, much like 12.0, and cannot yet recommend Slack 13 for the multimedia treatment.  However, if you want to try, there is one STRONG recommendation I can make.  Both MPlayer and Xine don't seem to play well with KDE4 (both 32 and 64 bit), so I would have to recommend XFCE over KDE4 for now if you want to try this on Slack 13.

VIDEO DRIVERS

Before we go any further, we must install the video driver for your card.  Both ATI and Nvidia have Linux drivers available on their website, and if you haven't installed the driver for your card yet, let's do it now before we do anything else.  After you've downloaded the appropriate driver for your chipset, simply log in as root, and while in the console (DON'T do startx) save a backup of your xorg.conf file with 'cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf .' which will save a copy of it in your current directory.  Then run the xxdriverxx.run file you downloaded.  To make life easier on yourself, when it comes to the last question "would you like to update the xorg.conf file?" PLEASE answer YES.  If things don't work when you do 'startx', you can go back to the original by running the .run file again with the --uninstall option.  This will (hopefully!) restore the system to original.  At least at this point, you haven't installed anything else, so if things go horribly wrong (EXTREMELY rare!), you can just go back and reboot the Slackware CD and reinstall it.  (You shouldn't have to format the /home partition this time.  After all, you have files there, remember?)  Now that you have your video driver installed, we can get to installing the needed libraries.

INITIAL LIBRARIES

Now that we have a base Slackware install, we can begin instaling our first libraries.  First, you must be logged in as a regular user.  This will help keep you out of trouble by not having root access all the time, only su'ing it to do the actual installs.  I found it easier to be in the KDE desktop to do all my work, because I can have a web browser open to find and download the packages, a Konqeror file manager open to right-click and extract the packages, and a Konsole window open to do the actual build and install.  That said, let's get to work.  First and foremost, the most useful package we need is also the first one we will install, the LAME mp3 encoder package.  While Slackware can PLAY MP3 files out of the box, this package will enable you to ENCODE MP3's using not only KAudioKreator, but also some of the other packages we will be installing during the course of this tutorial.  As of this writing, the current version is 3.98.2.  After downloading and extracting,  cd the directory in Konsole and issue these commands:

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-nasm
 make
 su
 make install

Another useful package to install at this point is ID3lib.  Slackware already includes another ID3 library, libid3tag, but some programs expect id3lib.

 ./configure --prefix=/usr
 make
 su
 make install

DVD Reading Libraries

The XINE media player in Slackware is great, but it needs a little help.  As it stands, it can play DVDs, but it can't properly play some of the formats otherwise unique to the "Redmond Monster".  So, the first thing we need to do is go to the MPlayer website and download a grocery list of goodies.  The first is optional, MPlayer and a skin to go with it.  But what we're REALLY after are the codecs package as well as libdvdread and libdvdnav.  There is an older libdvdread package floating about (libdvdread-0.9.7), but since it doesn't seem to have been actively maintained since 2006, we will use the MPlayer version (4.1.3).  BUT, if you want to play encrypted DVDs, you will first need to install the libdvdcss-1.2.10 package from the VideoLAN developers site.

NOTE: MPlayer includes these libraries in their source distribution, but we will install them now just in case we decide not to install MPlayer.  If you do decide to install MPlayer, the configure script will find these libraries and not build over them.

For libdvdcss:

 ./configure --prefix=/usr
 make
 su
 make install

If the './configure' or 'make' fail, you will probably need to run './bootstrap' first on a fresh extraction.  If you will be using libdvdread-0.9.7 instead of the one from MPlayer, the same instructions and caveats apply.

Installing libdvdread-4.1.3 is straightforward, BUT, whether you will be using either dvdbackup or lxdvdrip, you will need to download a patch from the dvdbackup site (you can grab the latest dvdbackup while you're there if you want to).  To install the patch into libdvdread, first copy the patch into the libdvdread-4.1.3 folder and run the following command:

patch -Np1 -i DVDFileStat.patch

Now we can build and install libdvdread and libdvdnav.  The only caveat here is that libdvdread must be installed BEFORE libdvdnav.

to install both:
 ./configure2 --prefix=/usr
 make
 su
 make install

Before we go any further, let's install the MPlayer codecs package.  To do this, simply extract the package and move the files themselves to /usr/lib/codecs.  The XINE player is already configured to look in this folder, so no further configuration is necessary.

Before moving on to the libraries, there is one other package we want to install:  lxdvdrip.  This handy little program will allow you to make backups of your favorite DVDs.  Remember the dvdbackup program discussed earlier?  Well, lxdvdrip actually includes its own version of that program, so we'll install it.

COPYRIGHT WARNING!  Please do not use this program to pirate DVDs!  Copying DVDs is still considered illegal in most countries, and this software is only intended to make a backup that you can view it at your leisure and avoid damaging the original.  I have had a DVD fly apart on me, so I know firsthand the value of backups.  With that said, let's move forward.

GOTCHA!  If you are working on a fresh Slackware install, the /usr/local/share folder probably doesn't exist yet, so PLEASE create it now.  As root, type this command:

mkdir /usr/local/share

If this is not done, the build will simply create a file called 'share', which will break any future installs if not corrected.

To install lxdvdrip:

 make
 su
 make install

While still root, install the lxdvdrip.conf file to the /etc folder with:

cp doc-pak/lxdvdrip.conf.XX /etc/lxdvdrip.conf
where XX is EN=English, FR=French, or DE=German.  You will want to at least look at lxdvdrip.conf at this point, just to see what parameters you will need to change at this point.

Lxdvdrip names its dvdbackup program dvdbackup_lxdvdrip, so to make it easier to call, we well create a symlink with its standalone name.  As root, go into /usr/local/bin and type:

 ln -sv dvdbackup_lxdvdrip dvdbackup


Lxdvdrip was written with the transcode library in mind, but can easily be used without it, as it contains another transcoding program, VAMPS, which is not only much faster than transcode, but from what I've seen produces slightly better transcoded video quality.  So, we will wait before installing transcode, because there are a LOT of other libraries that it will link with in order to get maximum functionality.

Before we forget, let's also install dvdauthor, which is required by lxdvdrip.

 ./configure --prefix=/usr
 make
 su
 make install

So far, we have created a system that can 1) rip audio CDs to MP3 that we can load into our favorite player, 2) play DVDs as well as most media files, and 3) make safety backups of our favorite DVDs.  Next, we will install the libraries and other programs necessary to turn this Slackbox into a robust multimedia system.

The Codec Libraries

From here on, unless otherwise noted, all the remaining software packages and libraries will be installed in /usr/local.  Also, in many cases there are newer versions available than what are listed here, but these are what I have installed and tested.

First up is a52dec-0.7.4.  Although many newer programs contain an implimentation of this in their own builds, this is the standalone version still used by some, so we will install this one first.

To install a52dec-0.7.4:

 ./configure --prefix=/usr
 make
 su
make install

The next few library packages are necessary for later programs to work

twolame-0.3.12 (mpeg layer 2 encoder)

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

libsndfile-1.0.20

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

libsamplerate-0.1.7 aka 'Secret Rabbit Code' (requires libsndfile)

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

For Apple's aac format you will need the following two packages (both available from www.audiocoding.com):

faad2-2.7 (NOTE: the --with-xmms option is optional, but will allow you to play aac files in xmms.)

 ./configure --with-mp4v2 --with-xmms
 make
 su
 make install

faac-1.28

 ./configure --with-mp4v2
 make
 su
 make install

OpenJPEG_v1_3 (the main page still says version 1.2 but 1.3 is available here)

 make
 su
 make install

libraw1394-2.0.4 (basic dv library used for reading in digital video from older firewire camcorders)
NOTE:  Slackware 12.2 includes libraw1394-2.0.0 in the distribution, so it is recommended you keep that one.

BUT,  if you must:
 
 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

libiec61883-1.2.0 (requires libraw1394)  Sadly, the original page, linux1394.org, apparently no longer exists, but the link will take you to the Debian page where you can get the latest source code (version 1.2.0).

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

libusb-1.0.4 (USB device control libs) (required by libdc1934)
NOTE: Slack 12.2 includes an OLD version, 0.1.12, but this installation will coexist just fine with it.  Packages linked to the old libusb will still use it, but any new packages will use this one.

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

libdc1394-2.1.2  Digital camcorder control API.

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

xvidcore-1.2.2  This is an MPEG-4 decoder.

Go into the build/generic folder, then

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install


gpac-0.4.5

Here is the first example of interdependence.  Gpac looks for ffmpeg, and will build without it, but our installation of ffmpeg will require libx264, which requires gpac to output mp4 files with H.264 compression.  After ffmpeg is installed, we can come back and reinstall gpac.

There is a secondary package, gpac_extra_libs-0.4.5, but we will not be using it, because most of the libraries in it are already out of date.  Besides, we have already installed some of the libraries we need.

To install gpac, you will first need to make the configure script executable:

 chmod +x configure
 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install
 make install-lib

Before installing x264 and ffmpeg, we need to install yasm, an assembler package needed to help build ffmpeg.

yasm-0.8.0

A complete rewrite of NASM, the Netwide Assembler.  We can safely leave NASM installed, as the two do not share any filenames. Besides, some programs out there still require NASM to build.

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

x264
There are no official releases of the x264 libraries.  However, daily snapshots are available at:

http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

NOTE:  The latest snapshots no longer work with ffmpeg, due to some library routines needed by ffmpeg having been dropped from x264 development.  The snapshot I am currently using is dated 20090328, and at least for me it works fine.

 ./configure --enable-shared --enable-mp4-output
 make
 su
 make install

NOW we can get to the first of the major packages, ffmpeg.  This is our workhorse for transforming video. Its most simple use if for converting from one format to another, but is capable of far more, like wipes, overlays, dissolves, and much more.  It is pretty fast, but it still is one of the reasons you need a FAST computer.


ffmpeg-0.5

 ./configure --enable-shared --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale \
 --enable-nonfree --enable-avfilter --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad \
 --enable-libdc1394 --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis \
 --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid
 make
 su
 make install

Now we can go back to the gpac folder and:
 su
 make uninstall
 make uninstall-lib
 exit (leaves superuser and back to your normal user)
 make distclean

Now reinstall
 ./configure (it will now see the ffmpeg libraries)
 make
 su
 make install
 make install-lib

At this point, you are now able to do some REALLY fun things, like rip a DVD movie and convert it to an mp4 file to watch on your iPod.  I will post another tutorial on that later.


Before we can install any more major packages, we need to install some more libraries:

libdv-1.0.0 (codec to handle video streams from digital camcorders)

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

libquicktime-1.1.3 (HIGHLY recommended by mjpegtools)

 ./configure --enable-gpl
 make
 su
 make install

mjpegtools-1.9.0

NOTE:  If you are building on a multicore AMD, it will probably attempt to configure for "Barcelona" and break the build.  To get around this problem, open 'cpuinfo.sh' in a text editor and replace 'barcelona' in line 148 with 'k8'.

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

libmpeg2-0.5.1 (required by transcode)

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

NOW we can install transcode 1.1.0, which is used by lxdvdrip.

 ./configure --enable-libpostproc --enable-alsa --enable-lame --enable-x264 \
 --enable-ogg --enable-vorbis --enable-theora --enable-libdvdread --enable-libdv \
 --enable-libquicktime --enable-a52 --enable-faac --enable-xml2 --enable-mjpegtools \
 --enable-libavformat --enable-libmpeg2
 make
 su
 make install


MPlayer  Also used by lxdvdrip, although you can configure lxdvdrip to use other players.

NOTES: 1) The MPlayer website recommends to use the latest source snapshot, as they consider 1.0rc2 outdated.  2) MPlayer includes libdvdread, libdvdnav, and libdvdcss, but will not build these if it finds these libraries already installed.

 ./configure --enable-gui --codecsdir=/usr/lib/codecs
 make
 su
 make install

NOTE:  You may have to add '--disable-ivtv' and/or '--disable-x264' to the configure options if make errors out.

Editing and Creating Videos

Kino is a non-linear video editing system for Linux.  Before we can install it, we need to install the libavc1394 package.

Libavc1394 requires the libdvdraw package, but we installed that earlier, so we are good to go.

libavc1394-0.5.3
 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

kino-1.3.4
 ./configure --disable-local-ffmpeg (we already have the latest ffmpeg installed!)
 make
 su
 make install

An alternate video editor is LIVES.  It requires the JACK package installed.

jack-audio-connection-kit-0.116.2
 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

lives-1.1.5
 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

Authoring DVDs

Tovid is a program to actually create the DVD format structure.  It's written in Python, and requires txt2tags to install.

First, we install txt2tags:
 su
 cp txt2tags /usr/bin (I have not gotten it to work in /usr/local/bin)

Now the tovid installation:
 ./configure --prefix=/usr (it won't build without this prefix!)
 make
 su
 make install

You now have a robust video editing system.  For audio production, we will build around the Audacity package.

First, we need to install the wxWidgets package.  Since we only really need the GTK widgets, that is what we will install.  We will build the object files into their own directory in case we need the source for another configuration.

wxWidgets-2.8.10
 mkdir build_gtk
 cd buid_gtk
 ../configure --with-gtk --enable-unicode
 make
 su
 make install

Now we can install Audacity.  The 1.3.9 beta comes in two flavors, the min package (for those systems with all the other libraries already installed), and the full package which includes all the other libraries.  We will use the min source package because we already have everything else we need already installed.

audacity-src-1.3.9-beta
 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install


That's about it!  If everything went well, you should now have a multimedia production system capable of producing media with quality that matches professional systems costing many thousands of dollars.  And I did this over the course of a day and a half, installing the basics on a Saturday afternoon, and completing it on Sunday, including writing the notes I needed to write this tutorial.

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