VLC 0.9.8a on Debian Etch

The Sipo.nl debian repository now contains VLC version 0.9.8a for Etch, WITH x264 support. For now, it is only available for the amd64 architecture. To use it, you need the following lines in your sources.list:

deb http://debian.sipo.nl etch-custom main
deb http://debian.sipo.nl etch-backports main
deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

• The first, ‘etch-custom’, contains VLC itself and a version of Ffmpeg (providing libavcodec and libavformat, among others) with libx264 support.

• The second, ‘etch-backports’, contains some backported dependencies of VLC and Ffmpeg, like x264, dirac, pulseaudio, alsa-lib, etc.

• The third, Backports.org, provides a recent version of libspeex1, a dependency of VLC.

• The last, Christian Marillat’s multimedia repo, contains the remaining dependencies, like libxvidcore4, libfaad0, libfacc0, liblame0, etc.

The VLC packages are backported from the Debian experimental repository, where version 0.9.8a was uploaded on December 3rd, 2008. Support for libx264 was enabled, while support for libdca, libschroedinger, libass and libv4l were disabled, because I couldn’t find or build those libraries for Etch.

Ffmpeg is backported from Christian Marillat’s repository for Lenny, without any real changes, except disabling libschroedinger support. x264 was also taken from Christian Marillat’s Lenny repo, which provides a recent version from the x264 Git repository.

Installing VLC should be as simple as running aptitude -t etch-custom install vlc. When Apt is correctly configured, all dependencies should install automatically.

CAVEAT: Etch provides libshout3 version 2.2.2-1. My VLC packages  probably DO NOT WORK with this version, although I haven’t tested it. In stead, you should probably install or upgrade libshout3 to version 2.2.2-5 from etch-backports at debian.sipo.nl.

All packages come without any guarantee. They work for me, please use at your own risk.