Building VLC from source under win32 (WinXP/Win2K) -------------------------------------------------- These are my detailed install notes for getting vlc-0.8.5 compiled from source under WinXP and/or Win2K using the free Cygwin distribution. 1. Obtain and install cygwin: a) Download: http://cygwin.com/setup.exe b) Run setup.exe and use all default settings c) Choose an ftp server: mirror.calvin.edu d) In package setup, be sure to install at least all the following in addition to the default set: o Devel/* (Everything under Devel category) o Libs/w32api NOTE: If in the future you find a package missing you can just run setup.exe again and add the missing package. 2. VLC depends on other libraries to provide some features like ac3 audio decoding or mpeg4 video decoding, etc. You can download and install pre-compiled libraries as follows: a) Download: http://download.videolan.org/pub/testing/win32/contrib-20060526-win32-bin-gcc-3.4.5-only.tar.bz2 b) Open cygwin shell window and change to directory where you downloaded above file. c) Extract the above file to your root directory as follows: tar xjvf contrib-20060526-win32-bin-gcc-3.4.5-only.tar.bz2 -C / 3. Install VLC source code and configure for the VLC build: NOTE: This example assumes you use c:/home/vlc-0.8.5-replaytv as the working directory and that you are compiling vlc-0.8.5. a) Make a fresh directory (c:/home/vlc-0.8.5-replaytv) b) Download VLC source code to that directory: http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8.5/vlc-0.8.5.tar.bz2 c) Open cygwin shell d) cd /cygdrive/c/home/vlc-0.8.5-replaytv e) tar xjvf vlc-0.8.5.tar.bz2 f) cd vlc-0.8.5 g) make bash script called "config" that contains the following: ---start config--- #!/bin/bash ./bootstrap && \ CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/win32/include -I/usr/win32/include/ebml" \ LDFLAGS=-L/usr/win32/lib \ CC="gcc -mno-cygwin" CXX="g++ -mno-cygwin" \ ./configure \ --disable-sdl --disable-gtk \ --enable-nls \ --disable-ffmpeg \ --enable-faad --enable-flac --enable-theora \ --with-wx-config-path=/usr/win32/bin \ --with-freetype-config-path=/usr/win32/bin \ --with-fribidi-config-path=/usr/win32/bin \ --enable-live555 --with-live555-tree=/usr/win32/live.com \ --enable-caca --with-caca-config-path=/usr/win32/bin \ --with-xml2-config-path=/usr/win32/bin \ --with-dvdnav-config-path=/usr/win32/bin \ --disable-cddax --disable-vcdx --enable-goom \ --enable-toolame --enable-dvdread \ --enable-debug ---end config--- h) chmod +x config i) ./config 4. make You're done. The resulting vlc.exe executable in the same directory you are in can be run as is without any further installation steps. To create a zip file distribution of your build you can use the following: 5. make package-win32-zip This will create a subdirectory named vlc-x.x.x with all the binaries 'stripped' (ie. without any debugging symbols) and then makes a zip file out of the distribution for release purposes.