ShowMeDo Blog

LAME (also known as libmp3lame) is a GPL library for mp3 encoding and decoding. It is used by ffmpeg to generate the FLV files which we use in ShowMeDo.

The follow-on to this article is Compiling ffmpeg on RedHat.

Compiling LAME is fairly straight-forward if your environment is already configured, but that wasn’t as obvious as I’d hoped. I share here the steps I went through to get LAME compiled and installed on a RedHat system.

First you need to run ‘configure’ which builds a makefile specific to your environment:

./configure

but annoyingly I had a failure:

checking build system type... mkdir: cannot create directory `./tmp/cg28625-18078': No such file or directory
config.guess: cannot create a temporary directory in ./tmp

The solution was to make a ‘tmp’ directory in my HOME directory:

mkdir ~/tmp

and export a TMPDIR so that the makefile knew where to find ‘tmp’:

export TMPDIR=~/tmp

After this I added $HOME as the directory for installing the compiled libraries (I already had a ‘bin’ and ‘lib’ in my $HOME):

./configure --prefix=$HOME

Next it was as simple as:

make
make install

and the LAME libraries were installed in my ‘$HOME/lib’ ready for use by ffmpeg.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.