Is it possible to compile ffmpeg in visual studio 2010?

Question

Is it possible to compile the sourcecode from ffmpeg in visual studio 2010? Is it difficult?

Just looking for some advice (and instructions) if possible. :-)

Cheers,

Pete

Answer 1

Apparently someone at Google has written a C99 to C89 "downconverter" in part to get ffmpeg to compile with Visual Studio:

http://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2012/09/27/microsoft-visual-studio-support-in-ffmpeg-and-libav/

The tool they wrote is currently only in source code form. Although that tool is written in C, it uses some compiler specific includes, specific to the Clang compiler, so you currently need clang to compile it. I had to get all the pieces to Clang (which relies on llvm) and compile with VS2010. OK, got that figured out, so now I have the two tools compiled: c99wrap.exe and c99conv.exe.

The blog does not mention two important things that are mentioned here:

http://libav.org/platform.html#Microsoft-Visual-C_002b_002b

First, you have to ensure the link.exe you use is the Visual C linker and not the mingw linker. Also, the msvc toolchain under msys does not yet support shared DLL builds, it only supports static lib builds at this time, so --enabled-shared fails to link.

Answer 2

It is not possible because ffmpeg makes extensive use of C99 features (with good reason), and MSVC doesn't support nearly enough nook and crannies of the standard.

You can however, use the C library built by MinGW for use with Visual Studio projects. See the following links for all the information you need:

1. Information about building/using the library on Windows with Visual Studio: http://ffmpeg.arrozcru.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
2. Downloads: http://ffmpeg.arrozcru.org/autobuilds/