-$Id$
-
-INSTALL file for the Windows9x/Me/NT4/2k/XP version of the VLC media player
+INSTALL file for the Windows 2k/XP/Vista version of the VLC media player
Running VLC
- natively on Windows, using cygwin (www.cygwin.com) with or without the
POSIX emulation layer. This is the preferred way to compile vlc if you want
to do it on Windows.
- NOTE: This is the PREFERRED way of building VLC natively (the others
- are not as much tested so expect more difficulties with them).
+ Read http://wiki.videolan.org/Win32CompileCygwinNew to have a complete HOWTO
+
+- On GNU/Linux, using the mingw32 cross-compiler.
+ This method is preferred over all the others.
+UNSUPPORTED METHODS
+-------------------
- natively on Windows, using MSYS+MINGW (www.mingw.org)
(MSYS is a minimal build environment to compile Unixish projects under
windoze. It provides all the common Unix tools like sh, gmake...)
Please note that the gettext utilities are not included in the default
MSYS/MINGW packages so you won't be able to build VLC with i18n support.
-- natively on Windows, using Microsoft Visual C++. Even though we provide some
- msvc project files with vlc, this method is advised only if you just want to
- experiment/play with some basic functionality in vlc. The reason for this
- is that vlc depends on a lot of 3rd party libraries and building them in
- MSVC is not convenient and sometimes even impossible.
- ( NOTE: if you want to run vlc under the msvc debugger, you need to run it
- with the --fast-mutex --win9x-cv-method=1 options because the debugger
- usually loses signals sent by PulseEvent() )
-
-- or on GNU/Linux, using the mingw32 cross-compiler.
- This method is preferred over all the others.
+- natively on Windows, using Microsoft Visual Studio. This will not work.
Getting the right compiler tools
================================
For Debian GNU/Linux users, you can use the mingw32, mingw32-binutils and
mingw32-runtime packages.
+For Fedora users, you can use mingw-binutils, mingw-gcc-core, mingw-gcc-g++
-- compiling natively on Windoze with cygwin:
+- compiling natively on Windows with cygwin:
You will need to download and run the setup.exe app from cygwin's web site
(www.cygwin.com). You will also need to make sure you install at least the
gcc-g++, gcc-mingw, mingw-runtime and win32-api packages.
-- compiling natively on Windoze with MSYS+MINGW:
+- compiling natively on Windows with MSYS+MINGW:
You will need to download and install the latest MSYS, MSYS-DTK and MINGW.
The installation is really easy. Begin with the MSYS auto-installer and once
this is done, extract MINGW into c:\msys\1.0\mingw. You also have to remember
Depending on your needs you will have to compile/install some or all of these
external libraries.
-* They can be found here (source code):
- http://download.videolan.org/pub/testing/contrib/
-
* We also provide a package with all the libraries already compiled so it is
actually really easy to compile a full-featured version of vlc (these compiled
libraries will only work with mingw or cygwin):
Please note the "-C /".
+* They can also be found here (source code):
+ http://download.videolan.org/pub/testing/contrib/
+
* An automated way of building the contrib libraries is provided in
extra/contrib. It will download, configure and build the libraries.
See the extras/contrib/README for more info.