cross compiling vlc using ubuntu unresolved reference

[kreljm]

When I follow the instructions on the https://wiki.videolan.org/Win32Compile/ wiki page I get all the way down to linking VLC and receive an error in ffmpeg
unresolved reference 'mkstemp'.

I have searched all over the internet to try to find a solution without success. I hope you can help me.

[jtl]

Hi Kreljm & all! This is going to be a bit long, so first a disclaimer: I've been very happy end-user
of VLC, and on that side I'm very thankful of your nice opensource player. Trying to build
it appears to be another story...

Now, we tried to use VLC as part of a scientific experiment and we wanted to slightly modify
it for the purpose. After a couple of days of fighting with just the compile part,
in the end we were unable to build it for Windows, so now we are looking for other solutions.

While doing that I run into an exact same problem that you have (among a ton of others)
on both Debian 8.5 and Ubuntu 14.04, following the instructions from the Wiki. I suppose
it'd be possible to implement mkstemp() yourself (some sources say it should come from mingw,
but couldn't find exactly how or where ...) and link to it, but I didn't follow this route as I was
just afraid that after that, there will be another problem, and then another. I was already quite
disheartened after trying compiling on

- Ubuntu 12.04, using either presupplied or self-compiled dependencies
- Ubuntu 14.04, same
- Debian 8.5, trying presupplied only

I tried VLC master from current git, and I also tried tag 2.2. I tried to disable some dependencies
to get forward, always running into yet another problem, until typically I ran into something that
made me toss in the glove (fyi, I saw for example missing avcodec enum definitions, SWS CPU CAPS
having disappeared, unability to process some .dli file because hRESULT was not the expected token?,
...).

I found out somebody had offered to pay for a coding project to make an Ubuntu image that'd
allow compiling VLC. I wonder if it finished?

I guess the main point of this longish rant is that it'd be very nice if the VLC developers could
give simple and unique pointers like : "Use exactly this platform and exactly this git vlc hash and
the (Windows) build will work". I couldn't find this information despite some furious googling. It
seems to me that the vlc code base is changing often, the dependencies are changing on their
side, etc. and the thing is in a constant flux, leading to the situation I observe. However, for
purpose such as ours, we'd be perfectly happy to compile whatever stable version of vlc,
even if it was a few years old.

If anybody knows a definite spec of 'build configuration' that manages to produce a working
Windows vlc executable, we'd be very grateful to hear about it.


Best,
J.

[chouquette]

Hi,

mkstemp was added into mingw-w64 4.0, would it be possible you have a version that's a bit too old?
Theoretically, VLC will build out of the box with all recent enough dependencies. Specifically, we require mingw-w64 v5.0 to build Direct3D11 correctly.

Depending on your distribution, you will need to upgrade or to build mingw-w64 from sources yourself

[jtl]

Hi Chouquette, thanks for the input! I installed an Ubuntu 16.04 on a vm, as it seems to have the
mingw 4.0.4 you mention. No 5.x, but I don't care about dx11.

With Ubuntu 16.04 I run into a problem that when building gui/qt, it runs MOC from contrib/i686-w64-mingw32/bin,
which leads to error 'cannot execute binary file: Exec format error'. My VM copy-paste doesn't work to
Windows currently apparently, so just wrote the key pieces there ...

ps. I also noticed that the bootstrap stage says 'gettext' is missing or needs to be updated. This
problem vanishes by installing 'autopoint' (yes, its on the wiki list, but a bit confusing that if
its missing, its mentioning gettext instead).

Edit: realized I need to double-check the PKG_CONFIG stuff on 16.04, try that later.

Cheers,
J.

[chouquette]

Sounds like to forgot this part: https://wiki.videolan.org/Win32Compile/#Linux_64-bit

[mesudpasic]

I'm new on this forum, and also new in this VLC project.
I have few questions, that if anyone could please guide me where to look for an answer.
I'm building my custom video player based on VLC, and I'd like to know few things:
1. how can I set up VLC to use custom skin as default UI, when it's installed and not the native style
2. is there a way to specify the name of the vlc.exe to be something else, like myplayer.exe, myplayer-cache-gen.exe etc upon build ?
3. what would be the easiest way to edit settings forms like the Preference settings form ?