How To build VLC in msys2

Building VLC on Windows is done using msys2. You need to install it first (x64 or x86, I use the former).

Then building is done in 3 steps:

• The build tools
• The contribs
• The VLC code

Msys2 Packages

It is important that you don't run pacman -Syu to update msys2 to the latest packages. The current gcc 8.2 produces VLC executables that don't run

VLC uses a lot of external code. And also many different tools to build this code. A lot of these tools are common in dev environment and some are not found in msys2 or needs some patching to work with VLC.

The first step after you install msys2 is to install the basic tools and toolchain to be able to build anything.

The basic things you need can be installed with

pacman -S make automake autoconf pkg-config libtool git patch dos2unix unzip yasm git gperf bison autogen python3 help2man
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config mingw-w64-x86_64-extra-cmake-modules mingw-w64-x86_64-python3 mingw-w64-x86_64-meson

You will also need a compiler to build native msys2 executable:

pacman -S gcc

You don't need this if you are using a custom LLVM-clang toolchain which comes with all the compilers you need. Otherwise you need a compiler for your target:

• x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc
• i686-w64-mingw32-gcc

So you need either these packages for x64:

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-headers-git mingw-w64-x86_64-tools-git mingw-w64-x86_64-make mingw-w64-x86_64-libwinpthread-git mingw-w64-x86_64-gdb mingw-w64-x86_64-nasm

Or for x86:

pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gcc mingw-w64-i686-headers-git mingw-w64-i686-tools-git mingw-w64-i686-make mingw-w64-i686-libwinpthread-git mingw-w64-i686-gdb mingw-w64-i686-nasm

If you plan to build libbluray with menu support you will also need to install a Java environment and have JAVA_HOME set properly. It should not contain spaces otherwise it won't be used correctly by msys2.

Get the VLC sources

In a mingw64.exe shell (or mingw86.exe if you plan on build x86 binaries) you clone the VLC repository:

git config --global core.autocrlf false
git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git

Build Tools

The first step in building VLC is building build tools that are missing or have a different version. Go in <path/to/vlc/root>/extra/tools and do the following in the shell:

export PATH=`cygpath -a build/bin`:$PATH
./bootstrap
make

Make sure it builds at least CMake. If it doesn't do it manually: make .buildcmake. This is required to have pkg-config work properly in msys2.

Contribs

In a mingw64.exe shell (or mingw86.exe for i686 output) first you need to set the environment variable to set the compiler. It may not be found correctly by make and CMake otherwise:

export CC='x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc'; export CXX='x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++'; export AR='x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-ar.exe'; export RANLIB='x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-ranlib'

or for x86

export CC='i686-w64-mingw32-gcc'; export CXX='i686-w64-mingw32-g++'; export AR='i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-ar.exe'; export RANLIB='i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-ranlib'

Then go in in <path/to/vlc/root>/contrib you create a folder where you will build and then build all of them. For x64:

mkdir win64
cd win64
../bootstrap --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="" CONFIG_SITE=/dev/null make fetch
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="" CONFIG_SITE=/dev/null make

For x86:

mkdir win32
cd win32
../bootstrap --host=i686-w64-mingw32
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="" CONFIG_SITE=/dev/null make fetch
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="" CONFIG_SITE=/dev/null make

This will take a long time. You can use more threads to make it faster by adding -j4 to the make command. You can adjust the number to amount of threads you want to use.

Once all the contribs are built you will have all the libraries in <path/to/vlc/root>/contrib/x86_64-w64-mingw32/ (or <path/to/vlc/root>/contrib/i686-w64-mingw32/).

Building VLC

In a mingw64.exe shell (or mingw86.exe for x86 output) you first need to boostrap the repository so it can be built.

First Make sure you have <path/to/vlc/root/extra/tools/build/bin> in your PATH:

export PATH=</absolute/path/to/vlc/root>/extra/tools/build/bin:$PATH

And boostrap:

cd <path/to/vlc/root>
./boostrap

Then can create a folder anywhere you want and build VLC in it. First make sure your environment variables are set:

export CC='x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc'; export CXX='x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++'; export AR='x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-ar.exe'; export RANLIB='x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-ranlib'
export CONFIG_SITE=/dev/null

or for x86

export CC='i686-w64-mingw32-gcc'; export CXX='i686-w64-mingw32-g++'; export AR='i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-ar.exe'; export RANLIB='i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-ranlib'
export CONFIG_SITE=/dev/null

Then you configure the build:

cd <build_folder>
<relative/path/to/vlc/root>/extras/package/win32/configure.sh --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --enable-debug --disable-nls --disable-ncurses

or for x86

cd <build_folder>
<relative/path/to/vlc/root>/extras/package/win32/configure.sh --host=i686-w64-mingw32 --enable-debug --disable-nls --disable-ncurses

And you're ready to build

make