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.

The result of some holiday free time is that I wrote up a FFmpeg Visual Studio project generator. 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. 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. 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. 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.įFmpegs 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. Even after that most build chains using this environment require a gcc based compiler which on Windows is MinGW.

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. 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. The default build chain for the FFmpeg project uses the standard (well standard for gnu open source projects) gnu autotools.

How to build ffmpeg for windows