Compile trouble was Re: [Theora] Piping AVI to ffmpeg2theora

[Nick Hill]

Two people have tried to help by suggesting named pipes. But named pipes 
don't work either.

I can't get ffmpeg2theora to accept avi files either through stdin or 
through a named pipe.

I guess ffmpeg2theora seeks through an AVI input, which would break down 
on a pipe. If seeking is necessary, then internally buffering the 
seekable input could be made to work.

I was going to look through the source to find a fix for this. However, 
I have tried compiling ffmpeg2theora from svn and from tarball source 
but have gone around in circles for 4 hours.

The svn download has incomplete install instructions, where I assumed 
the ./configure script it was talking about must be in the ffmpeg 
directory after running the download-ffmpeg script.. (I built FFmpeg 
several times, which would not encode theora) I then determined on the 
IRC channel that I need to run ./autogen.sh to create the ./configure 
script which the INSTALL file was referring to, I then determined I 
needed automake and libtools. Only to find the version of automake on my 
system is incompatible.

I previously overlooked the source tarball. I was directed to this 
through IRC.

For the source tarball, I could not get the configure script to identify 
that I had run the script to download ffmpeg source.

The compilation procedure for the ffmpeg2theora unwisely requires a 
download of whatever is the latest ffmpeg. I suspect ffmpeg has changed 
since the source tarball was made, making the ffmpeg2theora source 
tarball unbuildable. Perhaps it would be better to include the known 
working ffmpeg source with the ffmpeg2theora source.

I have not been able to build ffmpeg2theora from source and after 4 
hours of falling into traps, I don't now feel like looking at the source.

I have submitted an updated INSTALL file so someone else who downloads 
from svn won't fall into the same trap and will hopefully feel like 
looking at the source after (hopefully) sucessfully compiling.


Nick Hill wrote:
> I wish to transcode an AVI from 29fps to 15fps theora. I have tried many 
> combinations.