How to make Photofilmstrip work on Ubuntu 15.04

Question

I wanted to install Photofilmstrip on Ubuntu 15.04 unfortunately it was removed from the repos. I managed to install it based on how to install mencoder in ubuntu 14.10?. Unfortunately mencoder doesn't seem to work when trying to render a filmstrip:

When I use the cli version with:

photofilmstrip-cli -p Path/To/MyProject.pfs -t 4 -f 2 -o test.avi

I get the output:

PhotoFilmStrip 2.0.0-trunk
(C) 2010 Jens Göpfert
http://www.photofilmstrip.org

processing project  : Path/To/MyProject.pfs
using renderer      : MPEG4-XVid/AC3 (AVI)
output format       : HD (1280x720)
framerate           : 25 (PAL):

Exception in thread ResultFeeder:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/threading.py", line 810, in __bootstrap_inner
    self.run()
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/photofilmstrip/core/renderer/MovieRenderer.py", line 57, in run
    self.renderer.GetSink().write(result)
IOError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

I did the following to install photofilmstrip on Ubuntu 15.04:

Download Photofilmstrip from http://www.photofilmstrip.org/4-0-Download.html
Download mencoder from http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/amd64/mencoder/download
Install mplayer with sudo apt-get install mplayer
Followed the steps in how to install mencoder in ubuntu 14.10? to install mencoder
Installed Photofilmstrip with sudo dpkg -i photofilmstrip_2.0.0-1_all.deb

Any suggestions how to fix this?

Requist · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-03T20:47:37.690

Altering deb packages is a bit tricky since you are simply overriding dependencies, sometimes this works but there are no guarantees. The broken pipe is likely to come from this.

An alternative way would be to compile from source, often a simple configure and make will suffice but in this case that does not work and it will take a bit more effort to plow through all dependencies.

However the version you try to install is not the latest one, on sourceforge there is a newer one. if I take a fresh 15.04 install I am able to install this without any tricks just by using software-center:

download http://sourceforge.net/projects/photostoryx/files/photofilmstrip/2.1.0/photofilmstrip_2.1.0-1_all.deb/download
open with ubuntu-software-center and install

It seems in that version the mencoder dependency was dropped.

How to make Photofilmstrip work on Ubuntu 15.04

1 Answers1