User:Joeklow

General presentation

Software developer who works on a huge load of projects, concepts and ideas thus pays a little attention at his actions/steps. Avid, a bit. Using Gentoo/64-bit as primary development platform.

In a last year, I came to VLC-related projects four or five times.

* there was an old source of CCTV system I found on the 2010-dated drive, which used transcoding facilities to record data
* there's a specific plugin requested at freelancer portal and the task handed to me
* some subtitle magic which wasnt integrated so tighly as that beloved lua plugin at forum is, but still is used..
* experimental player UI concept that is still in progress
* other occasions

(note: no license violations happened and I avoid any binary redistribution)

So I decided to land my personal page here and fill it with some logs'o'vandalizing. Will probably edit Hacker Guide according to acquired data.

Dirty hacks

Cross-compile and build Win32 VLC plugin out-of-tree at 64-bit Gentoo

I hope that this page will be googled by strangers experiencing same problems, so plan is to leave a full story here. That experiment involved a lot of vandalizing both in my system and vlc sources - much fun.

1) I had troubles with 64-bit toolchain - didn't checked that x86_64-w64-mingw32 is actually a 64-bit compiler , and i686-w64-mingw32 is seemingly *not* available on Gentoo via crossdev.

2) someone left bugs in contrib files downloaded at 'make prebuilt' step:

 ls -l ../contrib/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/|grep libdts
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 1015 1016       56 Apr  8 20:57 libdts.a -> /home/funman/vlc/contrib/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libdca.a
  ls -l ../contrib/i586-mingw32msvc/lib/|grep dts
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 ft   ft         54 Dec 16  2012 libdts.a -> /home/jb/vlc-2.0/contrib/i586-mingw32msvc/lib/libdca.a

3) default lines in default vlc-2.0.7/win32/configure.sh are exotic for some builds, like this:

 --enable-update-check

4) different amount of .pc files per contrib's platform version:

 find ../src/vlc-2.0.7/contrib/i586-mingw32msvc/ |grep "\.pc" | wc -l
 66
 find ../src/vlc-2.0.7/contrib/x86_64-w64-mingw32/ |grep "\.pc" | wc -l
 62
 diff 32 64
 4c4
 < libswresample.pc
 ---
 > libchromaprint.pc
 7d6
 < portaudio-2.0.pc
 11d9
 < taglib_c.pc
 19d16
 < gnutls.pc
 25d21
 < zvbi-0.2.pc.orig
 36a33
 > harfbuzz.pc
 63d59
 < fluidsynth.pc

5) default vlc-2.0.7/configure file does not export PKG_CONFIG_PATH when it's required, but sets PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR

   if test "$build" = "$host" -o "$PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR"; then :
     export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="${CONTRIB_DIR}/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
 else

   export PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR="${CONTRIB_DIR}/lib/pkgconfig"
 fi

haven't checked if copying PKG_CONFIG_PATH line to second section helps something, but did it too while resolving problems.

6) on my system, there's a symlink from /usr/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw-pkg-config, /usr/bin/ming32-pkg-config to /usr/bin/crossdev-pkg-config and in that crossdev-pkg-config - 'unset' happens for PKG_CONFIG_PATH

7) same file, crossdev-pkg-config, contains function 'error', which must be eliminated from returning exit code 1 with unnecessary errors: it breaks configure.

 error() { 0; }

after that, it still produces makefile errors due to line separator

 CFLAGS_ogg =  -I/work/vlc/src/vlc-2.0.7/contrib/i586-mingw32msvc/include
 -I/work/vlc/src/vlc-2.0.7/contrib/i586-mingw32msvc/include

... to fix it, had to remove the whole final section around cross-dev-pkgconfig's bad_lines and add echo "${output}".

8) on Gentoo, proper compiler binary for 32-bit mingw is, for example, mingw32-gcc, mingw32-g++. (note: I read the wiki, but decided to try expected host value)

 ../bootstrap --host=mingw32-gcc
 make prebuilt
 curl -f -L -- "ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/contrib/mingw32-gcc/vlc-contrib-mingw32-gcc-latest.tar.bz2" > "vlc-contrib-mingw32-gcc-latest.tar.bz2"
 curl: (9) Server denied you to change to the given directory
 make: *** [vlc-contrib-mingw32-gcc-latest.tar.bz2] Error 9
 make: *** Deleting file `vlc-contrib-mingw32-gcc-latest.tar.bz2'

I went to ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/contrib/ and found the proper configuration is named i586-mingw32msvc *only* (aha, that is described at wiki too,... so 'mingw32' config must exist: ln -s i586-mingw32msvc mingw32)

9) configure line (called from vlc-2.0.7/win32):

 ../extras/package/win32/configure.sh --host=mingw32-gcc --disable-lua  --disable-nls --disable-lua --disable-mad --disable-avcodec --disable-avformat --disable-swscale --disable-postproc --disable-dvdread --disable-shout --disable-twolame --disable-dca --disable-flac --disable-theora --disable-schroedinger --disable-x264 --disable-caca --disable-skins2 --disable-libgcrypt --disable-update-check

10) random bug:

 preferences.hpp:72:19: error: expected unqualified-id before ‘char’ - 

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=102257 - "This is a bug in your toolchain." (c), so this case of Debianum Tremens shall be resolved by someone later. But on this case, it was required to build 3rdparty plugin out-of-tree, and so I just had to give proper dirs in makefile to make it fly:

11) don't know what garbage cross-pkg-config should provide to make this compile, because build seemingly lacked to pick all possible options 12) mingw32 collect2/ld seems to require -lLIBNAME argument to be passed AFTER *.o files 13) some functions like 'asprintf' and 'strcasestr' are hard to obtain on mingw32.

Here's my makefile for cross-building out-of-tree plugin (which is actually a modified subtitle demux): http://www.everfall.com/paste/id.php?15a3kv64pdt9