Comment 61 for bug 135874

The currently packaged version is compiled without ffmpeg and theora, and so does not play background videos.

Long story:

The original tarball contains a build.sh script that pulls in ffmpeg rev 8448 from svn.mplayerhq.hu. That svn repository, in turn, contains a svn:external that refers to svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk/libswscale — in other words, the *current* version of libswscale. As a result, libswscale fails to compile. The configure script then detects that not all of ffmpeg libraries are available, and disables the use of ffmpeg.

The ffmpeg.patch attempts to fix this by modifying autoconf/m4/video.m4 to accept any ffmpeg versions. In theory, this would allow to build stepmania with ffmpeg libraries installed on the system. However, for this to work, the configure script must be updated via autoconf/automake, and the original tarball does not include an autogen.sh script to accomplish this (although upstream svn repository does). With the original configure script, the system-installed ffmpeg libraries do not pass the version check, and are disabled.

To sum it up, there are two ways to build a fully functional binary:
 * Change the build.sh script to pull ffmpeg revision 8448 without libswscale, and then pull libswscale revision 22713 (which was current at the time ffmpeg@8448 was committed). Build via build.sh.
 * Use autogen.sh from the stepmania svn repository to update the configure script. Build via ./configure && ./make.

I should also note that this particular version (cvs-2007-11-07) has the desirable property of being close enough to the version used in Pump It Up PRO — the theme from PIU PRO can be adapted easily enough not to crash this version of Stepmania. Later, stepmania starts to diverge.