Hacker Guide/VLC source tree

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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 See below
include Header files for VLC
libs Contains 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 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/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.
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.