Win32Compile

How to compile VLC for Windows

Building Methods

If you want to build VLC from source, you have several choices:

Method	Documentation	Notes
Cross-compile with Mingw on Linux	This page	Preferred method (uses cross compilation). On Windows, you should do it in a virtual machine. Note: read Win32CompileFedora13 if building on Fedora 13
Native compilation with MSYS+MINGW	Win32CompileMSYSNew	Native compilation method. MSYS is a minimal build environment to compile Unixish projects under Microsoft Windows.
Native compilation with cygwin	Win32CompileCygwinNew	Build using cygwin as your compile environment. Error prone, and slow.

Obtaining the toolchain

Each build method requires its own toolchain:

Method	Notes
Cross-compile with mingw32 on GNU/Linux	Debian/Ubuntu users can apt-get install gcc-mingw32 mingw32-binutils.  Gentoo users can emerge crossdev && crossdev mingw32 Other systems may attempt http://www.mingw.org/wiki/LinuxCrossMinGW
Native-compile with MSYS+MINGW	Read the documentation
Native-compile with Cygwin	Read the documentation

Get the source code

$ git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git

3rd party libraries.

VLC modules requires numerous open source projects to work (like AC3 audio decoding or MPEG-4 video decoding).

If you feel you must build these libraries from source, go to extras/contrib and read the README.

If you want to save yourself a lot of time and energy, use the pre-built versions of these libraries. You may download them from http://people.videolan.org/~jb/Contribs/, named in fashion of contrib-yyyymmdd-win32-version-bin-gcc-gccversion-only.tar.bz2.

Install the pre-built libraries into the standard directories (/usr/win32/*) by using

tar jxf contrib-20061122-win32-bin-gcc-3.4.5-only.tar.bz2 -C /

(Note the "-C /"!)

Configuring the build

First of all, GetTheSource then run ./bootstrap.

Once you've got all the files you need in place, you need to configure the build with the ./configure script.

Good configure examples can be found in some files (in git). From the vlc source base directory you could run:

• extras/package/win32/configure.sh --with-contrib=/usr/win32 --host=i586-mingw32msvc
• extras/package/win32/configure.sh --with-contrib=/path/to/folder/containing/contribs

or just run configure manually, like

• ./configure --with-contrib=/usr/win32 --host=i586-mingw32msvc

See './configure --help' for more information.

Building VLC

Once configured, to build VLC, just run 'make'.

Once the compilation is done, you can either run VLC directly from the source tree or you can build self-contained VLC packages with the following make rules:

Command	Description
make package-win32-strip (might be package-win-strip)	Creates a subdirectory named vlc-x.x.x with all the binaries 'stripped' (that is, smallest size, unusable with a debugger)
make package-win32-7zip	Same as above but will package the directory in a 7z file.
make package-win32-zip	Same as above but will package the directory in a zip file.
make package-win32	Same as above but will also create an auto-installer package. You must have NSIS installed in its default location for this to work.

Well done—you're ready to use VLC!