Blacklight and Karmic

Written for Blacklight by ChrisLees on 2009-10-10

Due to licensing issues, the "libfaac" AAC encoding support in FFMPEG has been dropped from Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala". This also means that Blacklight can no longer encode your videos if you are using Karmic. It gets worse: The FFMPEG developers are talking about removing "libfaac" support from FFMPEG and not replacing it until their own AAC implementation is mature enough. They might have already done it, I need to investigate further.

This throws Blacklight's future up-in-the-air. The obvious way forward is to include a local copy of ffmpeg and the libav libraries from a time when these existed in FFMPEG, but until then you need to compile FFMPEG from source if you are using Ubuntu 9.10 or any recent big-name Linux distribution. Or virtualise an earlier version of your distribution and use it for Blacklight duties.

I will post more information here when I have it.