Posts: 46
Joined: Jun 2013
Reputation:
0
Hi XBMC
I have been trying to install XBMC Gotham on my Debian Wheezy. I have only been able to find repo's that are made for Ubuntu, but they dont seem to work - it installs, but I cant get any of the PVR-addons to install and skins for that matter. They all say "Broken" - dependencies missing.
Hope anyone can guide me in the right direction.
Greetings Søren, Denmark...
Posts: 23,314
Joined: Aug 2011
Reputation:
1,078
fritsch
Team-Kodi Developer
Posts: 23,314
You have to build it from source.
Start with looking at the documentation concerning dependencies on github.com/xbmc install them and afterwards compile
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
Posts: 46
Joined: Jun 2013
Reputation:
0
Thanks - got it build from source and works perfectly!
Posts: 44
Joined: Dec 2013
Reputation:
3
Hi,
Thanks for answering. I have read the comments and the lack of ffmpeg in Debian is not an issue, since the proposed package on mentors.d.o makes XBMC compile with libav.
If and when ffmpeg gets reintroduced into Debian, we can switch back to it.
Posts: 19,982
Joined: May 2009
Reputation:
451
nickr
Retired Team-Kodi Member
Posts: 19,982
Does debian have the equivalent of ppas so that someone can easily provide debian packages outside the strict debian ecosystem?
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
Posts: 17,859
Joined: Jul 2011
Reputation:
371
XBMC compile with libav != running stable.
You can make anything compile but that does not mean it will actually play like it should. Like already mentioned in the PR we use a lot of custom patches and also ffmpeg isn't the same as libav.
It's not just a matter of smacking libav into xbmc and it will run.
(do note this is not my area of expertise and it may just work fine but i trust the others know what they are talking about)
Posts: 23,314
Joined: Aug 2011
Reputation:
1,078
fritsch
Team-Kodi Developer
Posts: 23,314
Problem is concerning support. When something compiles, it does not necessarily mean, that it will run fine. This especially has made severe problems in the past concerning hwacceleration, be it vaapi or even worse vdpau. As most people search support here with us, we would like to have you shipping an xbmc version, that we thoroughly tested, which means one with internal ffmpeg.
Depending on the wide range of libav version out there, there is no guarantee that anything you did not consider will break. See also the ffmpeg patches folder for our current gotham version. Make sure to also port those to your libav/ffmpeg version, as those workaround / fix bugs, that we found during development. Not fixing those bugs in distribution dependend packages will give us a lot of work and at then end ... we will give those users our official ppas.
All these points need to be considered. Nobody has won, if xbmc gets into debian and does not run as intended.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
Posts: 23,314
Joined: Aug 2011
Reputation:
1,078
fritsch
Team-Kodi Developer
Posts: 23,314
You should also be the maintainer of libav ... to cherry-pick and integrated upstream patches, especially those they don't resync from ffmpeg.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
Posts: 44
Joined: Dec 2013
Reputation:
3
@fritsch: I see your point and I agree with delivering tested and stable software to users. I also agree with Debian's security guidelines which discourage delivering embedded copies of external projects in packages.
By updating XBMC in Debian only the unstable distribution gets the package automatically which is generally run by people accepting and willing to fix bugs in case of stability problems.
If XBMC's quality is not satisfactory using external libraries it won't get migrated to testing and finally, stable. It also won't get migrated if its dependencies' quality fails the standard.
Debian maintainers also work together on related packages, thus if XBMC triggers bugs in libav it will be reported against libav ain eventually it will get fixed.
Right now XBMC package exists but is fails to install and build in Debian unstable which prevents it from being tested, and being released as part of Debian stable in the future.
There are plenty of integration points between XBMC and the rest of the system and with uploading a working version we could at least start testing it.
Even if the switch to libav turns out to be problematic we could test a lot of other things and switch to ffmpeg when it becomes available with all the necessary fixes.
Posts: 7,650
Joined: Jun 2011
Reputation:
287
As long as ffmpeg is not in debian this is not worth looking into.