sdl, gpac, dss, and others

I should have roughly about 300 gig HDD to fill for my new toy, Ubuntu 8.04.  The smallest of the 4 HDDs is a 40 gig one, where I store the boot, os, and everything the is dependent on it, so that pretty much means all the software.  Then I should have 250+ gigs for data, should be primarily multimedia.  That should be fun.

For now, I am reloading the all software I used and think that I will be using, ffmpeg, mm codecs, mplayer, vlc, etc.  All were kind of smooth, just time consuming.  Here are couple of hurdles that might be worth documenting.

SDL - when configuring and compiling SDL, it does not care if there is no graphic drivers, or devices available.  Don't get why.  So a successful build of it does not mean much.  I ran vlc or mplayer, all were fine with audio, but video could not find any device.  So I had to go apt-get install a bunch of directfb, gtk stuffs.  Easy enough, just don't get why SDL doesn't crap out at config time.

gpac, except for its MP4Box, I never used anything else of it.  But it seems it has a player, a streamer, along with many other cool stuffs.  It seems that it does not compile with OpenGL.  Could also be something of OpenGL is missing on my machine.  I did not dig into it.  It was not recommended to build with OpenGL anyways, for performance risks, as it said in README.

dss, this is an interesting one.  It does not compile.  Something are apparently missing in header files, conditional compiled linux defs, head inclusion path in makefiles, head includes are even spelt wrong (in upper / lower cases).  It does not even have a readme file to tell you how to compile.  Try at your own risk :) .   Tired and frustrated, at 2 am in the morning, I found a patch file by chance, http://freebsd.ntu.edu.tw/FreeBSD/ports/local-distfiles/nork/dss-6.0.3.patch . No description or anything.  I figure it wont hurt to give a try.  Turned out it was one of the few right things I did in my life.  It took me 2+ hours to bust a quarter of all the problems, but 1.5 seconds to resolved the rest with this patch.  And then the build and install went on a smooth sail.

By now I think the re-setup of my Linux box, upgraded with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is pretty done.  It is a pretty distro.  When I plugged my cell phone, a mass storage device was automatically mounted.