Installing HTPC software (part 3)

In this entry we will have a look at how to install VDR (Video Disk Recorder) on Gentoo.

This time we are not going to utilise Gentoos excellent emerge-tool, but we are going to do it manually. Main reason for compiling VDR by ourselves, is that this way we get the version we want, with patches we want. For the first time it may be easier to install VDR via emerge, but later on, if you want to play more with VDRs plugins, I suggest that you compile it by hand.

Patching VDR can be little bit tricky, so I am going to use my old pre-patched version of 1.4.7 VDR source code. As with MMS there is also unstable release of VDR 1.5, this time however I am going to install the old and proven-to-be-stable version. You should probably download vanilla source code, that way you can patch it yourself if you need to and if not, you can keep the changes to minimum.

First thing is to take care of the dependencies, emerge libcap and jpeg. Those two are required for VDR to compile. Now download the source code (I am using root to run VDR, bad policy, I know) in to /root, then extract it. Now I have following directory /root/vdr-1.4.7 and I will create following symlinks, these are also needed for compilation. After that you can just issue "make && make install" in VDR directory.

ln -s /usr/src/linux /root/DVB
ln -s /root/vdr-1.4.7 /root/VDR

Compiling the plugins is a bit more involved. You must extract your plugins into /root/VDR/PLUGINS/src directory. That is not enough though, you also need to create a symlink for every plugin, removing the version numbering. For example this is what you would do for subtitles-plugin

cd /path/to/vdr/PLUGINS/src
wget http://virtanen.org/vdr/subtitles/files/vdr-subtitles-0.5.0.tgz
tar xvfmz vdr-subtitles-0.5.0.tgz
ln -s subtitles-0.5.0 subtitles

Do the same for all your plugins and modify the process accordingly, then just run "make plugins" in /root/VDR . If everything compiles correctly you need to copy the resulting files in /root/VDR/PLUGINS/lib to /vdr/lib, create the latter if it is not there already. (Notice that if you are compiling xineliboutput-plugin then you need to run "make install" in xineliboutputs own directory.)

Now you are set to go, meaning you can start the hard part, configuring VDR and plugins.

In next entry, configuring VDR and adding the needed scripts.