# Apple Lossless needs gstreamer-plugin-?, libav, ffmpeg,



## romanaOne (Jun 30, 2018)

I have loads of Apple Lossless files (created by iTunes in mp4 container format) and even though ALAC has been open source for years, nothing plays it by default.  I know gstreamer-/ffmpeg-/libav- something plays it because somehow the files work on my manjaro linux system.

VLC and Clementine both say that a gstreamer plugin is missing. Unfortunately, there is no indication which one and there are heaps of them.

Should I use gstreamer-bad, gstreamer-ugly, gstreamer1, gstreamer, gstreamer-ffmpeg, gstreamer-libav? libav, ffmpeg look like they play lots of things, but nowhere can I find any package (or port option) that explicitly says "install/select this to make Apple Lossless work."


----------



## shkhln (Jun 30, 2018)

I don't think VLC requires GStreamer anywhere, it's supposed to be self-contained. What kind of error do you get from VLC?


----------



## romanaOne (Jun 30, 2018)

Clementine said a gstreamer plugin is missing.
VLC said:

```
Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format "alac" (Apple Lossless Audio Codec)
```

Clementine started working after I rebuilt ffmpeg and libav from ports with everything. (I selected anything that even looked like it might be an audio codec in the port options.) I also installed gstreamer-plugins-bad because someone (in the Ubuntu forums, I think) said it was needed for Clementine to play alac. I'm not sure what made it start working, because it only started after I installed all of the above and decided to log out and back in.

VLC still did not work.  So I rebuilt it from ports and checked just about everything, even C64 sid support. (I actually still listen to sids and mods.)

Now it works.

I don't know how standalone VLC is.
`pkg info vlc-qt4` 
show loads of required libs but it is still not obvious to me which part makes the Apple alac .mp4 files work.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Jun 30, 2018)

You need audio/alac, then discover how to use it with what you want to use. Eventually that could be used automatically.

For the record, nothing depends on it.


----------



## shkhln (Jun 30, 2018)

romanaOne said:


> show loads of required libs but it is still not obvious to me which part makes the Apple alac .mp4 files work.



The wiki page claims ALAC decoder is a part of FFmpeg.


----------



## barnster (Jan 26, 2019)

shkhln said:


> The wiki page claims ALAC decoder is a part of FFmpeg.



For the past few weeks, I had been trying to get clementine-player to play ALAC. I finally got it working, and so now I want to share. What I had to do was to rebuild the port multimedia/gstreamer1-libav with the option FFMPEG selected, since it is not selected by default, so that it is used instead of the internal libav. I'm sure there might be other ways, but rebuilding gstreamer1-libav to use FFMPEG works for me.


----------



## NapoleonWils0n (Jan 27, 2019)

vlc-qt4 is the old version of vlc,
you want vlc3

vlc3-3.0.6,4                   Qt based multimedia player and streaming server


----------

