A week or so ago, I switched from using Gentoo Linux to the latest devlopment version of Ubuntu Linux. Scheduled to be released in April 2006, "Dapper Drake" contains the latest "unstable" development versions of various Linux software. The music player I use, Rhythmbox, was updated to use version 0.10 of the GStreamer media playback engine.
In previous versions of Ubuntu, which only had GStreamer 0.8, getting AAC files (like the M4A files supported by iTunes and iPods) to work was as simple as installing the gstreamer0.8-faad package, which decodes AAC files. However, in GStreamer 0.10, plugins for media formats are divided into the "good" (plugins that work and have appropriate licenses), the "bad" (plugins that do not currently work properly), and the "ugly" (plugins which have licenses which make them illegal to distribute in some locations). The Ubuntu package repositories contain binary packages for both good and ugly GStreamer 0.10 plugins. Unfortunately, faad is listed as "bad."
Luckily, it is possible to compile the "bad" GStreamer plugins from their source. First, one will need the development versions of certain GStreamer libraries. The following binary packages need to be installed:
- libgstreamer0.10-dev - the development version of the GStreamer 0.10 library.
- libgstreamer0.10-plugins-base0.10-dev - the development version of the plugin architecture of the GStreamer 0.10 library.
- libfaad2-dev - the development version of the FAAD library. Also install libfaac-dev to be able to encode AAC files.
If you have never compiled a package from source before in Ubuntu, you will need to install several other packages. If that were the case, however, it is unlikely that you would be using a development version of Ubuntu.
Once you have fulfilled the prerequisites, download the "bad" GStreamer plugin source and install it. You will have to specifically enable support for the faad plugin when using ./configure.
Good advice. Happily, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse recently weaseled its way into multiverse, so you can now just aptitude install that and rock on.
I really hope AAC playback via gstreamer will be working "out of the box" when Dapper goes final. Rhythmbox just dies a horrible and confusing death if you try to stream an AAC from a daap server without the appropriate library installed, and a truly new user might not be very happy about that.
I just looked, but could not find gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse. Could you provide a link on packages,ubuntu.com or something?
http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse&searchon=names&subword=1&version=dapper&release=all
Of course, if you go to that URL and try to clicky on the package itself you get a broken link - I think it's hot off the presses within the last couple of days. Make sure you're pulling the dapper multiverse repo from archive.ubuntu.com in your sources.list and it should show up.
Thanks.
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