avifile-0.53.2

Requires: QT > 2.1.0, XFree86 3.3.x or 4.0.x with Shared Memory Support

I originally tried using avifile-0.51 but had great difficulty getting it to grok the ac3dec I'd just installed. I gave up at the time, but as I turned my jumbled notes on video playback into a chapter, I decided to revisist avifile, and found that a new release was out!

Surely, I thought, avifile-0.53.2 will fix these pesky compile problems. Wrong I was. Despite spending a few hours trying to get ac3dec to compile into avifile, I had absolutely no luck. I'm not sure what it takes to get it included, but I must be doing something wrong.

After a bit more analysis of the files available on freshmeat , I started to wonder whether using libMPEG3 might be a better approach ”but without a word from the documentation for avifile, I didn't feel like messing with it. I have run into nothing with ac3 audio so far ”or at least nothing I'm aware of. The homepage for avifile is at http://divx.euro.ru/ . Get it now, before Microsoft sics their lawyers on the author for daring to decode ".asf" files as well. Microsoft is claiming that the whole format is proprietary and that an open source attempt to decode it is copyright infringement. This sounds like spurious reasoning to me, but I'm a Unix administrator, not a lawyer. Your mileage may vary. I downloaded avifile.tar.gz to my /usr/src directory, and did the following:

tar zxvf avifile.tar.gz

./configure with-qt-dir=/usr/src/qt-2.2.2/ enable-release

make

su -c"make install"

At this point, avifile is quite happy, but we need to install codecs, or it won't be much fun. From http://divx.euro.ru/ you can also get the binaries.zip, which contains pretty much all the codecs that avifile 's author has found. I'd love to give credit to the author by name , but he's carefully kept it off his Web site. Still, he's done good work on this code, and it was mighty kind of him to compile all these codecs for us. To get the codecs in place, do this:

su root

cd /usr/lib

mkdir win32

cd win32

cp /usr/src/binaries-001222.zip . #substitute the proper filename here

unzip binaries-001222.zip

rm binaries-001222.zip

exit

Avifile expects the codecs to be in /usr/lib/win32, so all we did was put them there. The aforementioned compilation took only about 10 minutes for me. Now it's time to move on to the next piece.