Compiling Boxee 0.9.11.5777 on openSUSE 11.*

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Having used Miro before, I liked the ability to play videos from different sources in a single program without having to visit every site. Miro was recently updated to version 2.0 and I could not find an RPM for openSUSE 11.0. The Packman repository had and RPM for 11.1 and not 11.0  :-(. Attempts at compiling from source failed..

News about Boxee everywhere. I decided to give it a try. Took a while to get it right.  Posting my experience here.

Download

Download boxee source rev 0.9.11.5777 from boxee.tv. Requires registration. Usage requires registration anyway!

Build Requirements

glew and glew-devel
libmad-devel
libtre-devel
SDL_image_devel
SDL_mixer_devel
libbz2-devel
fribidi-devel
lzo-devel
sqlite3-devel
libmysqlclient-devel
libjasper-devel
libcurl-devel
libhal-devel
cmake
nasm

and maybe more.. autoconf..etc., Install missing ones using YaST . An rpm -q package name will tell if it is installed or not.

Compile

Move to the downloaded folder. Uncompress and untar using

#in my case

cd /home/vimal/Software

tar -jxvf boxee-0.9.11.5777-src.tar.bz2

cd boxee-0.9.11.5777-src

#since there was no configure script present, I did an autoconf to generate it

autoconf

#i could only compile and run Boxee from the current folder. I could not get it installed in the final step. Hence, did not specify –prefix to configure

#run configure now
./configure

#followed by make
make

#and make again!
make

#for  reasons unknown, Boxee was not compiled in the first make. There were no errors either.  Issuing make again fixed the problem. This was an accidental find!

At this point the Boxee binary should exist in the directory and it can be launched by

./Boxee

Notes/Tips

  1. It takes a really long time to compile. If you have a dual core cpu, make -j2 really speeds up the compilation. This tip was from the README. 
  2. I disabled vertical sync. Otherwise, the response was very slow. This can be set from within the program under
    Settings ->Appearance->Screen
    or by editing ~/.boxee/UserData/guisettings.xml
    change  value under to 0
    0
  3. Fullscreen and windowed mode can be toggled using  
  4. If you have a Wii, and bluetooth on your PC, you can use the wii remote with Boxee. Check out http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/boxee_wiimote.html

 Boxee in Action

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