Build VLC for Android project failed on Ubuntu 12.04

Question

I want to work on the VLC for Android project. So first I need to compile this project, I follow all the steps on https://wiki.videolan.org/AndroidCompile/ but when I do the

Answer 1

I was stuck at:

contribs: make failed

I found another guide which helped me get this build working correctly.

The part that did it for me was the downloading and installation of protobuf3. Once I did that, vlc built for me.

Here's the snippet from the tutorial that made everything work

Download:

https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases/download/v3.1.0/protobuf-cpp-3.1.0.tar.gz

Then do:

sudo tar zxvf ./protobuf-cpp-3.1.0.tar.gz    # decompression
cd ./protobuf-3.1.0/    # Extracted folder 
./configure    # Run configure 
make
make check
sudo make install
make clean
sudo ldconfig  # Update shared  library cache

After this, running:

./compile.sh

worked correctly.

I have rebuilt libvlc on Ubuntu 14.04 since my attempt above on Ubuntu 16.04, and I noticed that this didn't fix my issue for Ubuntu 14.04. Once I created another Ubuntu 16.04 VM, this seamed to do the trick.

I think it's also related to the gettext program. Libvlc might be requiring a version of gettext only available on 16.04.