The VideoLAN Forums

In order to compile a customized version of vlc for Windows I started setting up a build environment. After reading into the wiki, I figured that using Linux to cross-compile for win32 would be the best option as this is what the official binary distribution is compiled with (afaik).

So I set up Debian Linux in a VM. I installed from the lenny CD, though I updated to the testing branch squeeze later on to get more recent packages. Then I installed the required packages as outlined in Win32Compile. I also manually updated mingw32-runtime and w32api as explained in some blog (I used runtime 3.18 and w32api 3.14 and later also tested with 3.15.2 and 3.13 though that didn't change anything), though I'm not 100% sure whether this was actually required as I'm not building ffmpeg myself.

Command to check compiler version: Since the command reported that I had version 4.2.1,I downloaded the respective contrib package. I later also tried a more recent version of the compiler in conjunction with the most recent contribs though the problem persisted.

I extracted the contribs using I also double checked they were in /usr/win32.

I then downloaded the 1.1.0 source tarball from the VLC Website. Apparently it doesn't contain the config scripts as explained in the wiki, though I could retrieve them from Git.

However when I started the configure with Just in case that's relevant, I did all this as root (yeah I know it's evil).

I'm totally at a loss as to why it is not working. Did I forget something important? Any ideas would be appreciated.

That script is in the git repository. I don't understand why you use the source tarball. If you just want VLC for Windows, you can download it precompiled from the website. If you want to modify VLC, then you really should use the source-controlled version from git.

Are the .pc correctly in /usr/win32/lib/pkgconfig/ ?

try running PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR= ..... pkg-config libavcodec

I don't understand why you use the source tarball. If you just want VLC for Windows, you can download it precompiled from the website. If you want to modify VLC, then you really should use the source-controlled version from git.

Guess I didn't know any better. Of course I want to modify it, otherwise all the hassle wouldn't be necessary.

Are the .pc correctly in /usr/win32/lib/pkgconfig/ ?

try running PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR= ..... pkg-config libavcodec

When I run that (with the correct path entered of course), it says I also checked the config.log again and apparently these programs are not there Am I supposed to have these programs? If yes, why doesn't the configure script complain about that?

Edit: Apparently I am supposed to have pkg-config. Thanks to xtophe for explaining this on IRC.

Ok after that configure worked. During make I ran into another error: I was able to resolve this by installing qt4 via However now I run into another error which is somewhat less descriptive:

Missing lua binaries.