Fedora 9 postinstall: multimedia dependencies, sounds and other annoyances

 in Fedora / Linux / MythTV  tagged atrpms / Fedora / livna / multimedia / MythTV / rpm / Video / yum (updated 5973 days ago)

After installing F9 I had to go through the process of reinstalling all my old multimedia tools. Fedora doesn’t generally include support for playing MP3s or DVDs so you have to install them from alternate repositories such as Livna or ATrpms. I’d written up how to do this in the past for F7 but with F9 you can find most of what you’ll need from Mauriat Miranda’s Personal Fedora 9 Installation Guide. I found all I needed there except information on MythTV. I know from past experience that MythTV is best installed from the ATrpms repository.

Before doing any updates I found that Fedora has finally tasted the kool-aid: they’ve added useless sounds when you login and do other desktop activities. Disable this quickly, before you mind turns to Muzak mush. Look under System->Preferences->Hardware->Sound, under the Sounds tab to disable this foolishness.

Once all your multimedia stuff is loaded you will probably run into a few small dependency issues when doing updates using yum. I had xmms with mp3 support installed on one box which caused a yum update to fail. I also had problems with packages on which MythMusic depends.

The first problem I hit was with totem-mozplugin and nspluginwrapper. I don’t need either of these so I just removed them:

  • sudo yum -y remove totem-mozplugin nspluginwrapper

Next I found that the xmms-mp3 package on one of my F9 systems was conflicting with MythMusic. I haven’t found a way to fix this yet and was left with simply removing xmms-mp3. At the same time I found that mjpegtools was also causing problems with yum updates. The fix here is to remove this package and then reinstall it after the update:

  • sudo yum -y remove mjpegtools
  • sudo yum -y update
  • sudo yum -y –disablerepo atrpms install mjpegtools

A binary packaged version of AcidRip (for ripping DVDs to small .avi files) was not available for F9 when I tried, but the F8 version from ATrpms works if you install lsdvd and perl-Gtk2. Then you need to add this link:

ln -s /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/AcidRip /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/AcidRip

Then again, a quick check shows there to be an AcidRip for F9 source RPM now so you may not need to do this for much longer.

MythTV

The MythTV metapackage doen’t install all the plugins so you have to get them separately. Some plugins would not install due to a conflict with the python-imaging package. Remove this package before installing the mythplugins package.

The more annoying problem with MythTV comes from MythMusic’s use of the faad library. There are conflicts between this library and some others when doing yum updates. To get around this I remove mythmusic and faad2, which removes a number of other packages, do the update and then reinstall the packages I just removed:

  • sudo yum -y remove mythmusic faad2 (also deletes mythplugins)
  • sudo yum -y update
  • sudo yum -y –disablerepo livna install mythmusic mythplugins avidemux mytharchive mythvideo transcode libquicktime