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HOWTO: Gentoo and the VLC GUI

Last night my goal was to mount a share on my desktop containing ripped DVDs (.vob files) using Samba. Then play the movies over the network with VLC so I can watch then on the TV in the family room. I’ve been using VLC on Windows for a long time and love it, so I figured this should be an easy task. Not so! After emerging VLC and all the library dependencies, I found that I had no GUI.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get VLC to play DVDs mounted on a Samba share…


1. Unmask VLC and libebml

# echo "media-video/vlc ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# echo "dev-libs/libebml ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

2. Enable wxWindows in VLC. If you don’t already have a package.use file, just create one.

# nano -w /etc/portage/package.use

media-video/vlc wxwindows unicode

Note that there are a lot of other USE flags in my vlc line in package.use, but the two shown above (wxwindows and unicode) are the ones absolutely required to get the GUI. The complete list I’m using is: dvd ffmpeg mpeg mad wxwindows aac dts a52 ogg flac theora oggvorbis matroska freetype bidi xv svga gnutls stream vlm httpd cdda vcd cdio live unicode.

3. Enable unicode support in VLC and wxGTK

# nano -w /etc/portage/package.use

x11-libs/wxGTK unicode wxgtk1

4. Emerge wxGTK so you still get wxGTK base.

# USE="-gtk2 -wxgtk1" emerge wxGTK

5. Emerge VLC

# emerge vlc

6. Mount the Samba share 

# mount -t smbfs -o username=foo,password=bar //callisto/dvd /mnt/dvd

After that everything seemed to work fine. I was able to stream DVD quality audio and video without any skipping. Very nice indeed!

Update: Oops! Corrected packages.use to package.use. Thanks.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Gentoo, HOWTO, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

15 Responses to “HOWTO: Gentoo and the VLC GUI”

  1. import this. » Blog Archive » Django in seven minutes Says:
    December 13th, 2005 at 9:32 pm

    [...] It’s encoded in H.264, so you’ll probably want to use VLC (now with GUI goodness!) to view it. Tom’s really done a nice job putting it together, and I recommend watching it. [...]

  2. Aleksandar Kacanski Says:
    December 19th, 2005 at 1:34 pm

    Thanks to you I finally got vlc GUI to work.
    Thanks,
    funny I am re-doing school web site and I choose django framework for it…
    /s

  3. Andy Says:
    February 6th, 2006 at 9:10 am

    Hey thanks for the assist on this. Xine has kinda been dying one feature at a time lately, and there has yet to be a good GUI for mplayer, so I decided to try VLC. Your assistance with the GUI problem is grealy appreciated.

  4. John Says:
    February 6th, 2006 at 10:40 pm

    Hi Andy, glad I could help!

    Good luck with VLC. It’s really matured into a nice package over the last couple of years.

  5. tuxracer Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 3:55 pm

    hi @all

    i can play files wih the vlc, but i also have no GUI
    but i want to have the GUI. UIhave all made how it’s upside writen.
    What should i do that i have the GUI.

  6. mat Says:
    April 28th, 2006 at 9:04 am

    I have the same problem - no GUI for vlc :-(
    I don’t quite understand steps 2 and 3 though.
    I mean, I can add USE flags to make.conf but I don’t have a packages.use file

  7. John Says:
    April 28th, 2006 at 9:17 am

    Mat:

    If you don’t have a packages.use file in /etc/portage, just create one. I’ve edited the post above to make steps 2 and 3 a little more clear.

    Thanks for the feedback.

  8. mat Says:
    April 29th, 2006 at 7:22 am

    Oh, smeggers, it still doesn’t work - I’ve followed your guid to the Letter and it still comes up with “Remove Control interface initilised, ‘h’ for help”

  9. Jurij Says:
    May 6th, 2006 at 9:41 am

    I think u should use this file
    /etc/portage/package.use,
    not /etc/portage/packages.use

    hope this helps ;)

  10. Jurij Says:
    May 7th, 2006 at 3:35 am

    in step 2 u edit wrong file
    the correct file is /etc/portage/packege.use
    more at man portage :)
    /etc/portage/
    bashrc
    package.mask
    package.unmask
    package.keywords
    package.use
    mirrors
    categories

    as u can see there is no file named /etc/portage/packages.use
    U should correct steps 1 and 2 to use the correct file.
    I think thats the only thing why your guide doesnt work :)
    this worked for me:
    this is output from
    #cat /etc/portage/package.use

    media-video/vlc X a52 alsa dts dvd ffmpeg mp3 mpeg ncurses opengl sdl skins truetype wxwindows xv
    x11-libs/wxGTK unicode

    emerge wxGTK
    emerge vlc
    enjoy :)

  11. John Says:
    May 7th, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    Thanks. I updated the post. :)

  12. Neo Says:
    December 1st, 2006 at 4:12 am

    Hay, thanks for all your tips… they were great and i got my VLC running at once by following above steps.

    A straight forward guide for any one wanting to try VLC.

    Thanks again…

  13. John Says:
    December 1st, 2006 at 7:55 pm

    Neo: Glad to help!

  14. Matt Says:
    November 21st, 2007 at 10:39 am

    You should stop using smbmount (via mount -t smb). It’s depreciated. Use cifs instead.

  15. Roman Says:
    December 2nd, 2007 at 1:56 pm

    Beautiful, this helped!

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