[Paraview] compiling ffmpeg for paraview on mac os x

[Michael Wild]

Hi all


I tried to get ffmpeg to compile the way as described in http://www.vtk.org/files/support/ffmpeg_source.tar.gz 
  for use in ParaView 3.3.0 CVS. But the instructions are quite stale  
and the included source does not compile on intel macs. So I pulled  
the current HEAD from ffmpeg subversion repository, but found it to be  
in a state which doesn't compile. I then extracted the tar.gz provided  
by fink (versioned ffmpeg-0.4.20071217) which compiles cleanly.  
However, there seems to be a change in the API which required me to  
remove the & in the expression url_fclose(&this->avFormatContext->pb)  
of the file VTK/IO/vtkFFMPEGWriter.cxx.

Things compiled now, but whenever I try to export a movie, ffmpeg  
reports on the command line that "[msmpeg4 @ 0x581c810]bitrate  
tolerance too small for bitrate" and ParaView tells me that  
"vtkFFMPEGWriter (0x1ce649b0): Error initializing video stream."

Ok, but in binary distribution of ParaView-3.2.1 things work, so I  
tried to figure out which version of ffmpeg has been used for the  
creation of that particular binary. I figured out that the ffmpeg  
revision used must be in the range 6350-6639, because otherwise the  
library versions don't match. But which of these 290 revisions? I  
tried some, namely 6350 and 6639, but both do not compile properly.  
For the latter I had to hack the configure script to create a valid  
config.mak and the common.mak I had to change in order to prevent the  
thing trying to link libavutil against itself (quite idiotic...).  
Finally things failed when the assembler choked on non-relocatable  
assembly code in libavcodec/cabac.h. Configuring ffmpeg to create  
static libraries however worked. But then linking libvtkIO requires  
the "-read_only_relocs suppress" flag to be set (which I'm not quite  
sure about what it does)...

At that point compiling succeeded, and I could even create an avi  
movie. However, the output is just black.

I hope that someone from the developer team can shed some light on how  
to get ffmepg working with paraview on Mac OS X.

Michael