problems installing faac/ playing online videos

[Turphy]

Hi, I'm new to linux but I think I'm getting somewhere with it. I've been trying to sort out playing online streaming videos like youtube and BBC i player and discovered I needed the Mpeg aac decoder. so I've downloaded faac but installing it seems to be more of a problem. 'bootstrap' and 'configure' seem to work fine but 'make' just gets the response "command not found". I've attached the full terminal read out in a text file. Can anyone help, this has been frustrating me for a while now. Is faac even the right thing to use for mandriva?

[reed9]

You should not need to build faac from source. I'm sure there must be a package available for it.

Go to Easy URPMI and enable the full set of official medias and the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) media, then look for it with your package manager.

[Turphy]

Thanks for the advice. I went to Easy Urpmi and enabled the official medias fine but the PLF ones gave an error message (attached). I then went to my install manager and installed all the missing gstreamer plugins as codeina said I was missing gstreamer 0.10-faad. I checked youtube to see if this worked and it does but streams quite jerkily. BBC iplayer still doesn't work at all. Any ideas what I might be missing?

[reed9]

Hmm, I would guess they're having trouble with the mirrors.

Try it this way. Open a terminal and do

su -
urpmi.addmedia –distrib http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/plf/mandriva/cfg/2010.0/i586

Since you were using a mirror based in France from your output, this is a different France-based mirror to try.

[nmset]

It seems you don't have make package installed. You may need other devel packages too. Just install the dev meta package :

urpmi task-c++-devel

faac is an encoder. The decoder is faad, which allows playback. The stream quality depends also on you bandwidth.

I personally think it's a good idea to compile such requirements yourself, you'll get less dependant this way.

[reed9]

I personally think it's a good idea to compile such requirements yourself, you'll get less dependant this way.

I strongly disagree. Compiling and installing software outside of your package manager can cause dependency issues, and makes it difficult to remove packages or do security updates.

You'll note that source based distros, like Gentoo, use build scripts to compile packages, and still allow them to be tracked by the package manager for this reason. And for ease of management. Other distros (or BSDs) which include any sort of ports like system do the same.

And anyway, why cause yourself more work? Heck, a big part of open source software is a certain laziness. As they say, "Good programmers code, great programmers reuse." Part of the Unix philosophy is "Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can." The point is to be more efficient and save work.

[nmset]

Well you're right in many aspects. We see in this case that Turphy didn't know he missed the make package. He could get a faad rpm from PLF. Next time he'll need a utility that won't exist at all as RPM but in source form, even in the PLF repos. So if he knows how to compile by himself, he'll enjoy more freedom. By dependency, I meant dependency on others, not system dependencies.

Nevertheless, "Good programmers code, great programmers reuse." is a saying I'll remember.

[Turphy]

Well, I've tried both pieces of advice. Reed9 - I typed the command out and I think it did some good but ignored alot of the media "by default" (konsole text attached). Can I change these defaults?

nmset - I installed the package but the plf install still came back with the same response, slightly changed with line "problem reading synthesis file of medium "PLF Non-free debug3"" now being about "PLF Non-free debug 6". Do I need more packages, they seem to be endless?
Glad to have started a bit of a debate. I agree with both of you - I don't want to rely on other people all the time, but I do want Linux to be as easy as possible.

[reed9]

I think those errors shouldn't matter, but I haven't used Mandriva since 2008.1. The debug and backport bits shouldn't be needed. The former contain packages with debug symbols to allow for testing and, well, debugging of programs.

You can also try Easy URPMI again. If it's a problem on their end, it would likely get fixed. I'd need to look into how Mandriva handles media sources again to guide anymore.

This is part of the reason I ditched Mandriva - in my opinion they have the worst package management system of any distro I've used and I always had trouble with it.

After doing that, were you able to find the faac package?

[Turphy]

Hi. Thanks for the quick response. I've got the faac packages but installing faad2 failed as I need to update my mirrorlist. so I tried urpmi again, this time with the console commands and got the attached response, can you translate this?
I kinda want to stick with mandriva as I'm getting somewhere with it now but if you can recommend something better for a total beginner then I might think about changing (at the moment I'm getting more and more tempted to return Bill Gates evil baby).