Installing Amarok packages from amarok-nightly server I've found with pleasure that a new option to choose between DirectShow, Mplayer and VLC is in place.

As I am experiencing this nasty bug:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209085
and it looks like something Phonon related I'd like to try how Mplayer and VLC Phonon backends behave.

Unfortunately when I select them I get the following error:

Unable to use the Mplayer Multimedia Backend:
The shared library was not found.

and the same for VLC:

Unable to use the VLC Multimedia Backend:
The shared library was not found.

Am I missing some package / library? VLC 1.0.1 is installed in the system but I don't think it is relevant to the problem.

Thanks for the help.
Diego

Could it be a Qt installation problem?
I found these:
http://techbase.kde.org/Talk:Projects/K ... ion#ktouch
http://forums.opensuse.org/install-boot ... -yast.html

It is not likely to be. It is more likely that KDE cannot find the VLC or MPlayer DLL's required to load the MPlayer / VLC Phonon backend. To resolve this you will need to set variables / copy files, but unfortunately only someone familiar with how this works on Windows will know exactly what to do.

In kde-vc90/bin/phonon_backend I have:

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phonon_ds9.dll  phonon_mplayer.dll  phonon_vlc.dll

So we can narrow down the problem to:

• some variable is not set;
• the files are not installed in the right place.

I'll ask on the IRC Windows channel, thanks.

Ok, the problem about the ds9 backend is that I don't have the time to fix these bugs, they depend on each computers ability to play a song with a directshow filter.
About the phonon-vlc and phonon-mplayer backends:
Please download this package (by hand for now) http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository-4.3/other/phonon-vlc-vc90-20091030-bin.tar.bz2 and unpack it into your KDE installation directory. Then put either the path of libvlc.dll (for the vlc backend) or mplayer.exe (for the mplayer backend) into your PATH variable and 'prefer' the backend in amarok or your systemsettings.
Both should work more or less, for any bugs you can find please open new bugreports in bugs.kde.org.
We will support those for now as they are easy to install (at least when we have made our homeworks and uploaded the packages) and remove the point of fixing bugs we cannot change...

Tested with VLC 1.0.1 and it works fine with both mp3s and oggs.
It seems overall pretty reliable, no lags, no skips. Overall CPU usage is generally low, memory consumption doesn't seem so good, but that's an impressive improvement over Phonon-DirectShow.
Finally I can use my Amarok on Windows installation without crashes and **** all over the place!

Uh, and for those how wonder how to set variable use, for example, this command:

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set PATH=%PROGRAMFILES%\VideoLAN\VLC\;%PATH%

Of course change the values accordingly to your installation / where you installed VLC.
Then start Amarok:

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%PROGRAMFILES%\kde\bin\amarok.exe --debug

and set the VLC backend in "Settings", "Configure Amarok...", "Playback". Then in "Sound system configuration" click "Configure", go to the "Backend" tab, bring VLC as the first option and "Apply".

Of course if it works you can set the PATH permamently (this page should help) so you don't need to do it all the times, and you can run Amarok from the menu.

The same should apply to MPlayer.

What can I say?
Thank you Amarok, Phonon, KDE for Windows, VLC and Phonon-VLC developers! You rock!

Now that I'm using it a bit more I can see some minor issues:

• a cmd.exe opens up on startup to display VLC logger, if you close the logger Amarok closes too. I think this can be disabled somehow;
• fade out isn't fading at all, it just cuts the sound after a timeout.

However these are issues that will be ironed out as Phonon-VLC matures.

Regards,
Diego

Hello together,

I got my Amarok working on windows vista.
Thanks a lot for your help!!
But now I have still a problem. I hope it does not sound too stupid.
I started it over the cmd line with the parameter --debug.
How do I turn it off?
And the second question: My amarok tells me, there is no equalizer available for "your version of phonon". Is this honestly true? Is there a way to get one?

Best regards

Crowdly

hi,

I'm running amarok on windows as well, problem is that vlc can't be found somehow.
I followed: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Download:Windows
I also set in system variable PATH the path to "vlc 1.1.0", but it still complains about not found vlc

anyone can help me?

thanks

i've successfully installed Amarok, it's all going swell, only, minor, problem is I get the 'The shared library was not found' error and when I play a track nothing happens.

Hoping for some relief from this error, and undaunted by the techspreche 'variable' word, I attempted to download the following as helpfully described by SaroEngels:

SaroEngels wrote:Please download this package (by hand for now) http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/r ... in.tar.bz2 and unpack it into your KDE installation directory.

Oh woe, the link is dead! Any chance of putting it back up or referring me to a better solution that may have been implemented in the meantime? Thanks! Keep on rockin' in the anarok world...

not sure what i am doing wrong but i get Amarok installed but VLC and Mplayer are not recognized. I have set the PATH and CLASSPATH in windows and have set the phono backend to VLC then mplayer but still same errors.

Any ideas?

unfortunate(did all as described):
amarok downloaded using kdeinstaller
installed nightly vlc
set system path(im on vista) to vlc´s folder
try to choose vlc backend - cannot find library error - freeze when trying to play.

Is it phonon-bug or vlc?

I think things have changed a lot since when I wrote the tutorial...

phonon-vlc now requires libvlc 1.1:
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/117 ... media.html
http://blogs.fsfe.org/myriam/2010/04/wa ... re-you-go/

Maybe we should wait that things settle down a bit!

Not related to Phonon, but just Amarok on Windows:
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/116 ... there.html

Well, I've spent about 4 hours working on this now, and it's been nothing but a waste of time so far. I've tried everything mentioned, setting "PATH" variable to "C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\" tried installing Mplayer, tried multiple versions of VLC, tried copying the libvlc.dll into the KDE folder, and I'm at a complete and total loss here. All the previous posts of what to do are fairly useless due to lack of description.
At this point, at least for me, I don't think it's possible to run Amarok on Windows.

I have almost the same problem with phonon on windows.
When I chose vlc-backend, there is an error message:
"Unable to use the VLC Multimedia Backend:
Could not find plugin 'VLC' for application %Application_Name%"
With mplayer or DS9 there is no error messages, but no sound too.
I have paths of each in the "PATH" variable and the lastest versions are installed.