About two years ago, I learned about Internet Television (aka IPTV) by using an excellent open source application called Democracy Player developed by The Participatory Culture Foundation. Since then, they have changed the name to Miro without sacrificing on features or usability.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get Miro to work with the binary packages provided in the Ubuntu repositories. It kept locking up about 7 seconds into each video without any sound output. So I tried downloading and installing the codecs and multimedia extensions. Still no luck.

Finally, as a last resort, I decided to try compiling the packages from source. However, the process did not go as smoothly as I hoped which prompted the desire to create this article. Open a Terminal session and follow the procedure below. You should be able to get Miro working in Ubuntu.

Install development tools:

• $ sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config imagemagick \
  subversion cdbs chrpath

Install prerequisites:

• $ sudo apt-get install python libboost-python-dev python-gnome2 \
  python-gnome2-extras python-gnome2-extras-dev python-pyrex \
  python-gtk2 python-glade2 python-gtk2-dev libxine-dev gettext \
  libxine1-ffmpeg libxmu-dev python-pysqlite2 libxv-dev libx11-dev \
  libssl-dev libboost-date-time-dev libboost-filesystem-dev \
  libboost-serialization-dev libboost-thread-dev xulrunner-1.9 \
  xulrunner-1.9-dev

Build packages from source:

• $ sudo mkdir working/miro
• $ cd working/miro
• $ apt-get source miro
• $ cd miro-1.1.2
• $ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b
• $ cd ..
• $ sudo dpkg -i *.deb

References:

• 1. Democracy GTK/X11 Build Docs
• 2. APT HOWTO - Working with source packages
• 3. Miro FAQ

Please feel free to leave any comments/suggestions.