Getting Started At Coding

Introduction to VLC development

VLC media player is a very popular project and is thus very fast changing and ever evolving project.

It is very important to keep up to date with the latest developments.
Therefore we advise everyone who makes changes to the VLC sourcecode, to sign up with the vlc-devel mailing-list so you can keep up with the latest changes and developments.

All our community lives on our IRC channel: #videolan on freenode. Joining is strongly advised.

If you need to report a bug, please read the reporting bugs documentation.

Get the Code

Start by building VLC and use Git to get the full source code.

You should also know how to compile VLC for your architecture.

Understand the Code

First, read the source tree explanation and the module tree explanation.

Then, read the beginning of the introduction to VLC's core and the modules loading documentation.

You can find more information on IRC and in the Hacker Guide.

Coding

Before sending a patch be sure to read Sending Patch.

Please try to keep to our code conventions. They are very simple and help to keep all code readable. When you write new stuff, especially core stuff (in the "src" or "include" folders), please comment it heavily or add doxygen documentation for your sources.