FreeNAS, FreeBSD and fucking FFmpeg

Hitting a brick wall when you’re close to getting something finished is one of those things in life that you hope will never happen but generally tends to.  It’s exactly what happened to me yesterday in my quest to make a package for Serviio that I could just install on FreeNAS.

Creating the FreeBSD build environment on my PC seemed as though it would be simple enough, throw up VirtualBox, throw FreeBSD at it and hopefully job done.  In actuality it was even easier than I’d expected when I followed the guide that I found on the FreeNAS forums the other day (see my earlier post).

Problem was that I know absolutely nothing about FreeBSD in general and that after many hours of bashing my head against building FFmpeg it all came down to one simple thing.  I should have rebooted when it all started going wrong!

Live and learn!