Common problem for CoppeliaSim (V-Rep) Installation in Ubuntu

Note: The author is user of CoppeliaSim Software

So CoppeliaSim (https://www.coppeliarobotics.com/) is a wonderful software with a wide variety of features for robotics learning. The simulator is concisely designed and is available for Windows, Ubuntu and MacOS. With a number of robotics models available out of the box, CoppeliaSim becomes a great tool for developing and testing robotics algorithms.

Recently when I downloaded CoppeliaSim for my fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, I encountered a peculiar problem for “Could Not Load Video Compression Library”. This error pops-up as a warning on the CoppeliaSim GUI and also on the terminal window. The terminal error looks like below.

I tried using the suggested method of using

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev

However the requirement was already satisfied on my system. And the problem persisted. The following was the solution to get around the problem.

SOLUTION:

Step 1: Go to CoppeliaSim Github Repository and download/clone the VideoRecorder package anywhere on your system.

Step 2:

Make sure you have Cmake installed on your system. If not do the following:

sudo apt-get install cmake

Step 3: Go into the videoRecorder folder that you have cloned in your system using command line. In my case, the folder is in Downloads

cd ~/Downloads/videoRecorder-master/

Step 4: Type the following in the command line:

cmake .

Wait for CMake to build the package for you. Then type:

make

Step 5: This will create a bunch of folders. Go into the folder named lib and you will find the libvvcl.so file there. Copy this file and paste it to the CoppeliaSim Folder.

There will already a libvvcl.so file in the folder, so just replace the file with this new file.

Step6: Relaunch CoppeliaSim. And the error should be gone.

Hopefully this will help.