Building FFmpeg in Visual Studio

The default build chain for the FFmpeg project uses the standard (well standard for gnu open source projects) gnu autotools. The use of configure and make may be rather familiar to those who compile often on linux but for many Windows developers these can seem like somewhat alien tools. This is compounded by the fact that to use these tools on Windows requires setting up a MSYS/Cygwin environment which can often be easier said than done. Even after that most build chains using this environment require a gcc based compiler which on Windows is MinGW. Gcc is a good compiler but MinGW can have some issues (which in its defence is generally always around Windows specific things) which can make it less than ideal.

FFmpegs default build tools do currently support compiling natively in msvc (Microsoft's C compiler) and will even convert the C99 FFmpeg code to msvc compliant C89 code. But this still requires setting up a MSYS shell and any additional FFmpeg dependencies don't offer msvc support from within the same build tools.

So as powerful as the configure/make build chains can be and say what you like about the msvc compiler (I agree its standards compliance is abysmal) but for those wanting to develop natively on Windows having Visual Studio support is the simplest and most robust. Since FFmpeg wont maintain a native Visual Studio build chain (and I cant blame them for not wanting to), I got a little bored and decided to take it upon myself to provide an alternative.

The result of some holiday free time is that I wrote up a FFmpeg Visual Studio project generator. This is a simple piece of software that will scan in the existing FFmpeg configure/make files and then use those to dynamically generate a visual studio project file that can be used to natively compile FFmpeg. This program not only builds the project files but will also generate the config files dynamically based on a combination of rules found in the original configure script and any passed in arguments. In fact the generator excepts many of the same configuration arguments as the configure script allowing fine-tuned control of what gets enabled/disabled.
Example command line options:

ffmpeg_generator.exe --enable-gpl --enable-bzlib --enable-iconv 
   --enable-zlib --disable-encoders --enable-encoder=vorbis

The program doesn't support all the options of the configure script but it supports many of them and in some cases actually exposes more than the original. Any option that shows up in the config.h file can be manually enabled/disabled through the command line. And even if an invalid option is set the generator uses all the inbuilt configuration checks found in the original build script to automatically validate each setting. Options such as 32/64bit are some of the options that are not supported, mainly because they are not relevant as the generated config.h file can be used for both 32/64 bit and even detects and enables inline asm if the Intel compiler is made available.

#define ARCH_X86 1
#if defined( __x86_64 ) || defined( _M_X64 )
#   define ARCH_X86_32 0
#else
#   define ARCH_X86_32 1
#endif

All of this happens dynamically so for those building from git master, once any commits are and added to your repo you just have to rerun the generator program and it will automatically detect any changes (new/deleted files, configuration changes, new/deleted options etc.) and generate a new project accordingly.

Now I should point out that this generator was rather quickly (and half-assed) thrown together so its not exactly very brilliant code. But for something quick and dirty it gets the job done. It supports all current additional dependencies but not all have been checked and it takes certain liberties with respect to library naming. This is because many dependency libraries don't have consistent naming conventions so the link include the generated project uses may not be exactly the same as the actually file you are linking against. Should this happen then you'll just have to manually tweak the file-name in the include option as without any kind of naming consistency there's not much that can be done about it.

The generator also by default generates a project with default Intel compiler settings. Those without Intel compiler may have to change a few settings in the project properties if they want to set it back to the standard msvc. Intel is chosen as default as Visual Studio 2012 doesn't support enough C99 features to be able to compile FFmpeg so only the Intel compiler can be used with 2012 to build the project. For those with Visual Studio 2013 the default compiler adds enough C99 to be able to get it to work but for the moment the generator is built to default to 2012. The same project can be loaded in both 2012/2013 and all that needs to be changed is the compiler being used. If there is enough interest I may add an option to the generator to allow for people to specify whether they want Intel support or not at generation time but in the meantime you'll just have to change the build tool in the project properties.

Update: The current version of the generator allows for specifying the compiler that will be used as default in the output project file. Of course this can also be changed directly in the project after it is generated but for convenience the "toolchain" option is now processed by the generator. With newer patches to FFmpeg Visual Studio 2013 can compile it without problems. The toolchian parameter accepts either "msvc" for default Microsoft compiler or "icl" for the Intel compiler which also supports inline assembly.

ffmpeg_generator.exe --toolchain=msvc

The project generator can be found in my git repo below. Also in the repo is a pre-built project that is built using the following command options:

ffmpeg_generator.exe --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-avisynth
   --enable-nonfree --enable-bzlib --enable-iconv --enable-zlib
   --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libspeex
   --enable-libopus --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libtheora
   --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-libvpx --enable-libmodplug
   --enable-libsoxr --enable-libfreetype --enable-fontconfig 
   --enable-libass --enable-openssl --enable-librtmp --enable-libssh

Update: The default projects now include libcdio, libbluray, opengl, opencl and sdl enabled. More will be enabled as they are tested. All of these dependencies have working Visual Studio projects found in the SMP directories in each of their repos found at the parent ShiftMediaProject repository.

Your free to use this project directly as I keep it up to date and all the necessary dependency projects can also be found in my github.

git repository:
https://github.com/ShiftMediaProject/FFmpeg