Earlier this summer, the version of cclive in the Ubuntu Lucid repositories stopped working for downloading videos from Youtube. Since cclive is such an amazingly useful utility, you really have no other choice but to compile an newer version of cclive from source to get it working again.

If you have the version of cclive that’s in the Meerkat repositories you probably noticed it stopped working for Youtube videos sometime around early December 2010. You will probably get a message like libquvi: server response code 404 Uninstalling the repository version of quvi and installing a version you compiled from a recent tarball (see part 1 below) should fix this.

The first step you may have aleady done. Install the packages you need to compile your own packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall

Part 1 – Compiling quvi

Next you need to compile quvi from source which does not seem to come with the current version of Ubuntu. Go to the quvi project on Sourceforge and download the latest tarball for Linux.

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/quvi/files/0.2/quvi-0.2.10.tar.bz2

Next you will need to install a few needed dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev libpcre++-dev libtolua++5.1-dev

I also installed the plain curl package just because it’s such a useful utility. But I don’t know for sure if you need it.

The next to steps are pretty obvious. Untar the quvi tarball you downloaded a few minutes ago:

untar -xjvf quvi-0.2.10.tar.bz2

And go into the quvi directory that just go created:

cd quvi-0.2.10

Now you are ready to run configure

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-nsfw --enable-broken

Rather humorously, enable-smut will give you the option of downloading from adult sites. Since version 2.8, this option has been relabeled “enable-nsfw”.

One thats done you run make

make

...and after compile and install your deb

sudo checkinstall -D

Part 2 – Compiling cclive

Originally tried downloading the very latest version of cclive (0.7.0b), but that required me to compile from source several more packages just to build cclive. Version 0.6.5 did not require this and worked pretty reliably, so I downloaded the tarball for that:

wget http://cclive.googlecode.com/files/cclive-0.6.5.tar.bz2

I think when Ubuntu Meerkat is released I will try compiling the very newest cclive version because presumably I will have the very newest packages. Or even more likely the version cclive in the Meerkat repositories will have been compiled for the latests sourcecode and work flawlessly

Again again the obvious – untar, and go into your new cclive folder:

tar -xjvf cclive-0.6.5.tar.bz2

cd cclive-0.6.5

Once in the new cclive directory run configure

./configure

...run make

make

And finally compile and install your cclive deb

sudo checkinstall -D