How to build Gem on MacOSX Mavericks

How to build Gem on Mac OS X Mavericks

This document describes how to build Gem on Mac OS X Maverick (OSX-10.9).

Requirements

Tool chain

Xcode command line tools

You need to download the Xcode Command Line tools. They come with Xcode but if you don't want to install full Xcode development package, you can run the following in a terminal

$ xcode-select --install

and then click Install rather than Get Xcode.

brew

brew is a package manager for OSX that provides various libraries. It is not strictly necessary to build Gem, but it comes in handy if you want to install third-party libraries.

pkg-config

pkg-config eases the use of various Development packages:

$ brew install pkg-config

gettext

You also need the GNU tool gettext. You can install it from several package managers, but it doesn't seem to work with brew when I am writing this. So I built it from sources. Get the source here: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/ And follow the README instruction to build it.

gettextis needed by automake tools. If it's not installed, it tries to make the job without it but in my case it failed, so I installed it.

Some people reported that they succeeded with brew's gettext using the following command, but I haven't tried it (yet):

$ brew install gettext
$ brew link gettext --force

Pure Data

You need a recent version of Pure Data (Pd). The latest one can be found on http://puredata.info/downloads

Note that there are 32-bit and 64-bit version of Pure Data. But 64-bit Pd-extended is not well supported for now. So maybe 32-bit is a good choice at first.

get Gem's sources

$ git clone https://github.com/umlaeute/Gem.git

third party libs

Gem has a plugin system which adds lot's of functionalities depending on installed libraries.

ImageMagick and FTGL

The following also installs dependencies (like Freetype):

$ brew install imagemagick ftgl

Output

Mac OS X comes with an OpenGL framework but you can enable other outputs by adding some libraries:

$ brew install sdl homebrew/versions/glfw2 homebrew/versions/glfw3

Building process

The following steps will build Gem from the commandline using autotools. I assume that you have changed your working directory to the Gem root.

autogen.sh

If you have cloned the git repository, you have to build the building tool yourself:

$ ./autogen.sh

configure

Then configure the building chain with:

$ ./configure --enable-fat-binary=i386

I use the --enable-fat-binary=i386 to force 32bit binary because I'm building against Pd-extended 32bit. If configure cannot find Pd (e.g. because you installed it in a non-standard location), you have to tell it where to search by adding a flag like --with-pd=/Applications/Pd-0.45-5.app/Contents/Resources/.

You can configure to build against Pd-Vanilla/64bit with:

$ ./configure --with-pd=/Applications/Pd-0.45-4-64bit.app/Contents/Resources/

Since this should become a 64bit build, omit the --enable-fat-binary flag.

Disabling specific frameworks

Apple has a rather aggressive strategy of deprecating and removing components from their system (e.g. compared to how Microsoft deals with backward compatibility).

The Carbon framework has been deprecated in OSX-10.8.

The QuickTime framework has been deprecated in OSX-10.5 and is not available at all on 64bit platforms. It has been replaced by the QTKit framework, which has been deprecated in OSX-10.7 in favour of the AV Foundation framework.

While Gem tries to dynamically check whether a given framework is present/usable on your system, it unfortunately does not a very good job. Luckily you can help the build process, by manually disabling frameworks that you know are not useable on your system (or that you don't want to use for some other reason)

When building for 64bit (or when using a newer OSX), you are strongly advised to disable both the QuickTime and the Carbon framework, by passing the following flags to configure:

   --without-QuickTime-framework --without-Carbon-framework

Build

Then build with:

$ make

Currently (2014/09/15), it's not possible to disable Quicktime plugins on Mac OS, so you might get error if you're building a 64bit binary. To ignore those errors and go ahead use : make -k

enabling more plugins

Enabling plugins needs to happen right before compiling Gem (or the respective plugins).

VLC - grab images using libVLC

Get VLC and install it (I assume it is installed into /Applications/VLC.app).

Unfortunately, VLC is not automatically detected, so you have to tell configure about it, by exporting the following environment-variables before running ./configure:

export PKG_LIBVLC_CFLAGS="-I/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/include"
export PKG_LIBVLC_LIBS="-L/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/lib -lvlc"

GMERLIN - opening films

gmerlin is a generic media decoding library, that uses - among other libraries - ffmpeg.

Therefore install ffmpeg first (the additional arguments will install ALL optional dependencies for enhanced functionality):

$ brew install ffmpeg $(brew info ffmpeg | egrep "^--with-")

At time of writing, the last release of gmerlin/gavl has been a while ago, and is no longer compatible with recent ffmpeg. Therefore you should get the latest development version via svn:

$ svn checkout http://svn.code.sf.net/p/gmerlin/code/trunk/gavl
$ svn checkout http://svn.code.sf.net/p/gmerlin/code/trunk/gmerlin_avdecoder

Then build the two libraries (first gavl, then gmerlin_avdecoder which depends on the former):

$ cd gavl
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure && make install

$ cd ..

$ cd gmerlin_avdecoder
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure && make install

At time of writing, I had to edit gmerlin_avdecoder/po/Makefile.in.in and change the value of GETTEXT_MACRO_VERSION at the beginning of the file to match the gettext-version installed on my system:

GETTEXT_MACRO_VERSION = 0.19

Once gmerlin-avdecoder is installed, running Gem's ./configure will automatically detect and use this library.