PSA: Failed configure of oss on Fedora 40 [solved]

[PriamX]

A public service announcement for my fellow Fedora folks:

I received the following error when running configure for makemkv-oss-1.17.8 on a Fedora 40 bare metal system.

[snip]

Code: Select all

checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes
checking for libavcodec libavutil... yes
checking for gcc options needed to detect all undeclared functions... none needed
checking whether LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR is declared... yes
checking LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR... failed
configure: error: in `/root/ServerSetup/ARM/MakeMKV/makemkv-oss-1.17.8':
configure: error: LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR is not known at compile time in libavcodec.h
See `config.log' for more details
[admin@mediaserv makemkv-oss-1.17.8]#

This was familiar to me, I had received this error on a previous Fedora release ages ago; I just couldn't remember how I'd fixed it.

A small amount of sleuthing led me to discover my libavcodec.h was missing. On Fedora this resides in the 'ffmpeg-devel' rpm. A simple 'dnf install ffmpeg-devel' fixed the issue.

I'm posting this here because my ffmpeg-devel went missing in the upgrade between Fedora 39 and 40, this has not happened in previous version upgrades; my ffmpeg-devel was upgraded along with everything else ever since I'd added that rpm many versions ago. If this happens to you too, perhaps you'll find your way here.