fatal error: libavcodec/defs.h: No such file or directory

[chrplr]

Hello

I wrote a small go program which relies on go-astiav to extracts frames from videos.

This programs compiles and runs well on a Linux machine under Ubuntu 25.10 which has libavcodec version 61 installed with apt install.

However, I cannot build it on a Ubuntu 22.04 LTS machine where the libavcodec version installed by apt install is 58. The compilation crashes with the message:

# github.com/asticode/go-astiav
../../../go/pkg/mod/github.com/asticode/go-astiav@v0.39.0/discard.go:3:10: fatal error: libavcodec/defs.h: No such file or directory
    3 | //#include <libavcodec/defs.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

My current solutions are : avoid using ubuntu 22.04, or manually install a more recent version of libavcodec-dev on the ubuntu 22.04 machine. However, I wonder if it would e easy (?) to make your code robust to this difference between versions of libavcodec.

Best regards,

[asticode]

Hi Christophe,

First off thanks for using this library ❤️

Indeed it seems that the defs.h file was added in this commit which was only included in the 59.1.100 version.

Unfortunately I don't see any way to make the library handle both versions since GO (like C) needs used header files explicitly listed and I can't maintain several versions of ffmpeg.

I don't know your exact context but it may be a good idea to try using docker since it allows having one consistent environment whatever OS you're on.

Cheers