Talk:MacOSCompile

(comments withdrawn)

First of all, this wiki isn't the correct place to discuss this kind of questions. vlc-devel at videolan is a far better place. Anyway, it's correct that you can use the 10.4u SDK as well. In fact, VLC obviously automatically does so on Intel-based Macs. Concerning your 2nd comment: no further tool beside the default installation to /usr/local is required to build VLC (excepting svn/subversion in rare cases). Any other 3rd party library, which would usually end up in that directory is built and installed inside VLC's code base, in extras/contrib to be precise. That's clearly stated on this HOWTO page. Please mail the mailing list mentioned above for further feedback. Additionally, when complaining about VLC in general or particularly documentation, keep in mind that we're doing this in our spare time and that we aren't required to answer your requests, especially when strangers to this project get demanding and impolite. feepk 01:27, 1 February 2007 (CET)

Change how the build intruction are shown --Pdherbemont 20:34, 31 May 2007 (CEST)

I would suggest we put the build command in some form easier to read, like :

• Build the third party libraries

 cd vlc/extras/contrib
 ./bootstrap
 make 

• Now build vlc

./bootstrap
./configure
make

(By the way, the current instruction to use make src doesn't work. make alone is sufficient and necessary. --Chjones 00:59, 18 June 2008 (CEST))

Compiling VLC on Mac OS X (draft)

Compiling VLC media player on Mac OS X is different from normal compilation on Linux and Mac OS X. We do not use Xcode, nor a simple ./configure and make. Below you will find instructions for how to compile VLC on Mac OS X - remember to check the prerequisites before taking the plunge.

If you wish to develop or test please join the vlc-devel mailinglist.

Please do not publish any of the non-released test binaries or svn-compiles on software sites or on user-forums. We have had bad experiences with this before and we do not appreciate it.

Prerequisites

• Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) or 10.5.x (Leopard)
• Xcode 2.4.x or Xcode 2.5

Optional:

• Subversion

Mac OS X 10.4 (Universal) SDK (a part of Xcode) is required to build the external libraries of VLC.

Your GCC version should be set to 4 (the default setting).

Xcode can be found online or on the Developer Tools disc, which accompanied Mac OS X.

Compiling with earlier releases of Mac OS X and/or Xcode will not work.

If building VLC media player on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, be sure to read the paragraph on this specific version below, before proceeding.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Note, that only VLC's current development trunk can be compiled on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. While the 0.8.6 series, when compiled on Tiger, works on Leopard (as expected), no current stable branch compiles on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

As widely published, this version of Mac OS X includes a new release of Xcode, called Xcode 3, which includes many cool new features, but unfortunately, it is incompatible with VLC. You need Xcode 2.5 to compile VLC on Leopard, which can easily be installed in addition to your Xcode 3 tools. However, you need to edit your PATH variable before doing anything with VLC's source. In case that you installed to to the default location (/Xcode2.5) and you are using the default shell (bash), this is pretty simple:

export PATH=/Xcode2.5/bin:/Xcode2.5/sbin:/Xcode2.5/usr/bin:/Xcode2.5/usr/sbin:$PATH

Note that you need to repeat this PATH edit every time you relaunch the shell. You can avoid this by editing your bashrc file. Once Apple releases a fixed linker for Mac OS X Leopard, this work-around will not be necessary anymore and you can use Xcode 3 as expected.

Starting with Leopard, Xcode may be installed to a custom location on the administrator's choice. While this is non-problematic for ordinary Xcode projects, VLC needs a little help. You have to place extra symbolic links in /Developer pointing to your custom location for these folders:

usr, Headers, Private, SDKs, Tools, Makefiles

You can easily create these links by executing the following command for each folder (whereas theFolder is one of these six):

ln -s /full/path/to/Developer/theFolder /Developer/theFolder

Regarding Fink

If you have Fink installed, then you will need to disable it. VLC media player has it's own form of Fink (in the extras/contrib subdir) and it can conflict with Fink. We use this system to generate a reliable, consistent and known amount of packages that VLC media player requires.

To disable Fink comment the line: #source /sw/bin/init.csh in your .cshrc file or . /sw/bin/init.csh in your .bashrc file in your home-directory.

Steps

Please follow these steps for compiling:

Get the source

Download the VLC media player source code using subversion (as described on the "Get the source" page) or get a recent source tarball. Note that the 3rd party libraries will probably break a few months after the release's publication.

These instructions below are always for the currently unstable, non-released code.

If you compile from Subversion then please remember that this code can often be in an unstable state.

Build external libs

We now need to build the 3rd party libs. For that, you will need to:

• cd to the source directory with your Terminal application.
• cd to the extras/contrib subdir of VLC and execute ./bootstrap
• Now execute make src. This will download and compile all the required external libraries and programs. You will only have to do this once. (You can do it again if required libraries are added or updated by the team.)

If bootstrap exits with an error message on Mac OS X Leopard, check the paragraph on this version above.

Prepare the VLC build

Now we return to VLC itself. Go back to the top level VLC source directory. If you use Subversion (which you really should), then run ./bootstrap.

This will create configure and Makefiles for VLC media player (snapshots and releases already include this).

Configure the VLC build

The next step is to configure, in the top level VLC source directory.

In current trunk revisions, you can simply run ./configure --enable-debug --with-macosx-sdk to get VLC in its default configuration. If do not want to use VLC's default configuration for Mac, be sure to add --disable-macosx-defaults to your custom set.

When compiling earlier revisions or the 0.8.6 branch, you need to give a wide variety of configure flags to achieve a useful build. We used to use this set: ./configure --enable-debug --disable-x11 --disable-xvideo --disable-glx --enable-sdl --enable-mad --enable-libdvbpsi --enable-a52 --disable-dvdplay --enable-dvdnav --enable-dvdread --enable-ffmpeg --enable-faad --enable-flac --enable-vorbis --enable-speex --enable-theora --enable-ogg --enable-shout --enable-cddb --disable-cddax --enable-vcdx --disable-skins --disable-skins2 --disable-wxwidgets --enable-freetype --enable-fribidi --enable-caca --enable-live555 --enable-dca --enable-goom --enable-modplug --enable-gnutls --enable-daap --enable-ncurses --enable-libtwolame --enable-x264 --enable-png --enable-realrtsp --enable-lua --disable-libtool

You can add --with-mozilla-sdk-path=./extras/contrib/src/gecko-sdk --enable-mozilla to the configure-line to enable the compilation of VLC's Safari/Firefox plugin.

Build VLC

After configure is finished, we can finally build VLC media player. A simple make will do the trick. If you want to use the resulting application package on a different Mac or a different account on the same Mac, run make VLC-release.app afterwards. Use the resulting VLC-release.app for these purposes.

History

Written by Jean-Alexis Montignies, Felix Paul Kühne and Derk-Jan Hartman, for the VideoLAN Team. Adapted to the Wiki by Jean-Baptiste Kempf. Edited by Jesper Stemann Andersen.