PMS working on Solaris

[lokedhs]

I have spent a bit of time lately to get PMS working properly on Solaris, and I'd like to share my experiences.

I started out with the Linux version, and theoretically it should just work, since PMS is written in Java, and as such there should be no real difference.

However, tsMuxeR is a Linux binary, and there doesn't seem to be a Solaris version available (and there is no source code available for this application). This obviously doesn't work on Solaris, so subtitles are out. For some, that might be a big problem, but it's not so much of an issue for me.

Secondly, PMS runs the command "mkfifo" to create the pipe to which ffmpeg writes its output. The problem is that Solaris parameters for mkfifo are slightly different compared to the Linux counterpart, so I wrote a small wrapper shellscript, named it "mkfifo" and put the path to it first in the path. This causes PMS to run the shellscript instead of the real mkfifo, and the script can then call it with the correct parameters. I have attached my script for your information.

It would certainly be nice if PMS checked if it was running on Solaris and adapted the flags to accommodate.

The rest of the problems were mainly related in getting a working version of mencoder that is able to decode H.264 properly. In the end, I managed to compile it by finding the correct combination of GCC and GAS versions, combined with me manually editing some files and compiling one of the files without optimisation (the last one could either be because of a bug in their code, or a bug in the compiler).

Anyway, I finally got it to work, and it runs pretty stable now. And in the end, it's really worth it. Solaris really shines as a home server. If anyone else is trying to get this working and is still having problems, please let me know and I'll probably be able to help.

Regards,
Loke

lokedhs@gmail.com