“App’ing up” PyQt… ugh.
One of biggest problems with PyQt is distributing it in a stand-alone package. Even worse… wanting to make your Qt plugins still function (Phonon, jpeg, etc). At work I constantly had this battle, along with my co-worker Tory. She actually has a long-standing issue with this, and had to resort to workarounds or half fixes. Here is Tory’s original post regarding the issue .
I would see an error similar to this when trying to package up and run an app using the Phonon module.
Running
does add things like the jpeg plugin, but never seemed to fix the Phonon issue. I finally decided to randomly look online for a solution, again, last week. What I found was a partial solution, followed by me trying one more thing and bam…it worked! Video playback from my .app standalone package.
Here is what I did …
(btw you might have to modify the location of the plugin, since I happen to be using OSX)
- In your setup.py file, which is used for py2app, py2exe, or similar… add this to the DATA_FILES list, so that it looks as such:DATA_FILES = [('phonon_backend',
['/Developer/Applications/Qt/plugins/phonon_backend/libphonon_qt7.dylib'] )]This will put the phonon backend plugin into the RESOURCES folder in the app.
- Package up your application via py2app / py2exe / etc.
- If you are on OSX, use macdeployqt on the app:>>> macdeployqt myApp.app
- Go into the app that was created (show package contents if you are on a mac), and move the phonon_backend directory FROM the Resources directory TO the PlugIns directory (which should be at the same level as Resources).
That should be it!
