KDE Craft now delivers with vlc and libvlc on macOS

Lacking VLC and libvlc in Craft, phonon-vlc cannot be built successfully on macOS. It caused the failed building of KDE Connect in Craft.

As a small step of my GSoC project, I managed to build KDE Connect by removing the phonon-vlc dependency. But it’s not a good solution. I should try to fix phonon-vlc building on macOS. So during the community bonding period, to know better the community and some important tools in the Community, I tried to fix phonon-vlc.

Fixing phonon-vlc

At first, I installed libVLC in MacPorts. All Header files and libraries are installed into the system path. So theoretically, there should not be a problem of the building of phonon-vlc. But an error occurred:

We can figure that the compiling is ok, the error is just at the end, during the linking. The error message tells us there is no QtDBus lib. So to fix it, I made a small patch to add QtDBus manually in the CMakeLists file.

diff --git a/src/CMakeLists.txt b/src/CMakeLists.txt
index 47427b2..1cdb250 100644
--- a/src/CMakeLists.txt
+++ b/src/CMakeLists.txt
@@ -81,7 +81,7 @@ if(APPLE)
 endif(APPLE)
 
 automoc4_add_library(phonon_vlc MODULE ${phonon_vlc_SRCS})
-qt5_use_modules(phonon_vlc Core Widgets)
+qt5_use_modules(phonon_vlc Core Widgets DBus)
 
 set_target_properties(phonon_vlc PROPERTIES
     PREFIX ""

And it works well!

A small problem is that Hannah said she didn’t get an error during linking. It may be something about Qt version. If someone gets some idea, welcome to contact me.

My Qt version is 5.12.3.

Fixing VLC

To fix VLC, I tried to pack the VLC binary just like the one on Windows.

But unfortunately, in the .app package, the Header files are not completed. Comparing to Windows version, the entire plugins folder is missing.

So I made a patch for all those files. But the patch is too huge (25000 lines!). So it is not a good idea to merge it into master branch.

Thanks to Hannah, she has made a libs/vlc blueprint in the master branch, so in Craft, feel free to install it by running craft libs/vlc.

Troubleshooting

If you cannot build libs/vlc, just like me, you can also choose the binary version VLC with Header files patch.

The patch of Headers for binary is too big. Adding it to the master branch is not a good idea. So I published it on my own repository:
https://github.com/Inokinoki/craft-blueprints-inoki

To use it, run craft --add-blueprint-repository https://github.com/inokinoki/craft-blueprints-inoki.git and the blueprint(s) will be added into your local blueprint directory.

Then, craft binary/vlc will help get the vlc binary and install Header files, libraries into Craft include path and lib path. Finally, you can build what you want with libvlc dependency.

Conclusion

Up to now, KDE Connect is using QtMultimedia rather than phonon and phonon-vlc to play a sound. But this work could be also useful for other applications or libraries who depend on phonon, phonon-vlc or vlc. This small step may help build them successfully on macOS.

I hope this can help someone!