The Ayman and Naaman Show

Hey Naaman – having a nice holiday?  Still thinking about your grandparent?  I never met mine.

Over the past few days, I was doing some hacking. Well actually ./configuring.  You see, I got myself a media server which does uPnP.  And, I was building MediaTomb to get my mac to transcode and send videos on the fly to the server.  Took some doing.  You see I had two package managers installed on my MacBook for several wrong reasons.  So I did an rm -rf on Fink…leaving me with MacPorts (google those yourself if you like).  MediaTomb wasn’t my real problem.  You see I wanted it to hook to FFMPEG to make thumbnails and transcode as it streams.

This brought me to the ffmpegthumbnailer-1.3.0 project on Google Code.  I couldn’t get it to configure (which you have to do before you can compile it).  OK – so i set some flags:

$ env CPPFLAGS=’-I/opt/local/include’ LDFLAGS=’-L/opt/local/lib’ PKG_CONFIG=’/opt/local/bin/pkg-config’ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=’/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig’ ./configure

And it still dies.  Turns out, you have to install some variants along with FFMPEG.  Long story short:

$ sudo port install ffmpeg +gpl +lame +x264 +xvid +avfilter

This will put all the libs in place so you can compile happily.  Now I wanted to share my findings (in more detail).  SO I turned to the WIKI for the project.  And I can’t post my instructions.  So where do I post it?  How do I share my findings to help others?  How do they find it?  Really? Am I left to leaving ppl to google around to find something and maybe see my humble blog post?

It seems while we build communities for photos sharing, throwing zombies, and taking photos (and any mix thereof) – communities for builders are overlooked.  Cast somewhere between DIY and blog posts of command line args.  Think someone might help us eventually? GitHub – I’m looking in your general direction.