Hacker Guide/VLC source tree

This page lists the directories in the source tree of VLC to give an overview of the code. Because VLC has evolved with not so much accumulation in mind, when a new coder looks at the code, s/he is terrified by the abundance of directories. This page was prepared to remedy that situation.

The directories are listed in alphabetical order, with an overview of their contents on the right.

Directory Name	Directory Explanation
bindings	Java, CIL and Python bindings
contrib	for required libraries (contains Makefiles to automatically download and compile (or cross-compile) and patch those). Please first attempt to get the development headers precompiled for your distribution.
doc	Documentation (not up-to-date)
extras	See below
include	Header files for VLC
libs	Contains the loader (win32 dmo codec loading on Linux) and a SRTP library
m4	Macro files needed for automake and autoconf
modules	The most important directory besides src/. See Modules source tree.
po	i18n (language translation) files
projects	Projects based on libvlc, Mozilla plugin, ActiveX plugin and Mac OS X Framework
share	icons, scripts to make VLC the default player etc.
src	The most important directory besides modules/. See src source tree.
test	scripts to see if everything is OK

Contents of extras

extras/analyser	contains some code style editor (vim, emacs) macro and some valgrind suppressions
extras/buildsystem	contains alternative buildsystems
extras/deprecated	contains deprecated files
extras/misc	contains files that don't fit into any other category
extras/package	contains distribution specific files such as ipkg, different rpm spec files, win32 and Mac OS X installation files.