Ebixio

These are the steps I found are required to install DigiKam v4.10 on Ubuntu. In my case I ran into problems with libavcodec (ffmpeg/libav) and issues stemming from the ffmpeg project fork. YMMV.

First install digikam:

add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/extra
apt-get update
apt-get install digikam

At this point everything should have worked nicely. Unfortunately digikam (version: 4:4.10.0-trusty~ppa3) wouldn’t start up. Running it from the command line showed that I was missing libavcodec.so.53. To confirm:

ldd /usr/bin/digikam | grep libavcodec

The normal solution to this would have been:

apt-get install libavcodec-extra-53

But life is not that simple. Ubuntu deprecated and removed libavcodec-extra-53 and claims libav-tools should be used instead. libav-tools however doesn’t include a libavcodec.so.53 file, so after a bit of hunting around, I decided to just build it from source. Here are the steps:

git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git
cd ffmpeg
git checkout -b ver53 dd453f
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-ffmpeg --disable-ffplay --disable-ffprobe --disable-ffserver --disable-avdevice --disable-swresample --disable-swscale --disable-postproc --disable-avfilter --enable-shared --disable-debug --enable-gpl --enable-x11grab
make
sudo su -
checkinstall
ldconfig

After this, digikam started up properly.

Notes:

gitk --all libavcodec/version.h shows that after the dd453f commit the libavcodec version changes to 54, so that’s why that commit was used.