GIMP-GAP has no encoder support

[Brandon]

Binary package hint: gimp-gap

When going to encode imported frames to a video, the master encoder doesn't detect any video encoders. I have ffmpeg and mencoder installed.

I'm using 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04.

apt-cache policy gimp-gap:
gimp-gap:
  Installed: 2.2.2-1
  Candidate: 2.2.2-1
  Version table:
 *** 2.2.2-1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

From what I understand, the gimp-gap package has it's own ffmpeg source tree that should compile with the rest of the package, and this makes me suspect that it was configured with --disable-video-api-support, which disables ffmpeg.

[Jimmy Angelakos (vyruss)]

Yeah, I confirm this is also true in 64-bit 8.10, it's actually quite annoying as it makes gimp-gap practically useless...

[mrg (esmrg)]

I believe I have discovered why this is.

I decided to compile gimp-gap-2.4.0 from the source tarball at gimp.org.
Using all dev packages from the repository (9.10) for gimp and other dependencies, the build failed in file ./gap/gap_dbbrowser_utils.c line 160. Apparently (according to the comments) this function is a copy of one including in the gimp source header files. gcc fails because it doesn't know which version of the function to use and instead of using the local copy - it returns the error -> function already defined in _SOME_GIMP_HEADER_H and gives the file name. Why this function is copied from the gimp libs makes no sense to me, but removing the local copy of the function in gap_dbbrowser_utils.c (or commenting out) will result in a successful build.

My guess is that the package maintainer either mis-interpreted the error or has a policy of not modifying code and just disabled the offending module in the configure options. This disabled the ffmpeg video encoder support.

[Hans L (thehans)]

I have never been able to get this package to recognize a video file for extracting frames. I have mplayer installed, and it deocdes my videos perfectly on it's own, but when trying to extract frames from the same videos from within GIMP GAP, it fails every time.

[Thibaut Paumard (paumard)]

I'm guessing the original bug is no more valid (GAP is at version 2.6 now and the package has been substantially modified).

thehans, do you get any error message, especially if you launch gimp from the console?

Make sure the last checkbox in the "MPlayer based extraction" dialog ("MPlayer 1.0pre5") is unchecked (it is checked by default). Does it help?