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
doc	Documentation (not up-to-date)
extras
include	Header files for vlc
libs	Containts the loader (win32 dmo codec loading on Linux) and a SRTP library
lxdialog	Make menuconfig files
m4	Macro files needed for automake and autoconf
modules	The most important directory with src/. See Modules source tree.
po	i18n files
projects	Projects based on libvlc, Mozilla plugin, ActiveX plugin and MacOS FrameWork
share	icons, scripts to make VLC the default player etc.
src	The most important directory with modules/. See src source tree
test	scripts to see if everything is OK

contrib (subdirectory of extras) - 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. extras also contains the emacs.init file (useful for coding in Videolan style)
ipkg	A package distribution system used by some Linux disrtibutions. This probably contains definition files for the packages.