[vlc-devel] Support for Windows on Arm

[Steve Lhomme]

On 2022-09-09 10:34, Pierrick Bouvier wrote:
> On 9/9/22 10:29, Steve Lhomme wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 2022-09-09 10:22, Pierrick Bouvier wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I'm contacting you to talk about VLC support for Windows on Arm (arm64).
>>>
>>> At Linaro, the project https://www.linaro.org/windows-on-arm/ is working
>>> to enable open source projects for this platform.
>>> VLC being widely used is on our radar.
>>>
>>> It seems like an experimental build of vlc 4.0 was made in 2018, and is
>>> available from VLC Windows download page ("Windows ARM 64" variant).
>>>
>>> We would like to help creating up to date versions, to add same level of
>>> support than win32/win64 variants. Is there something blocking today
>>> (machine, support in vlc 3.0 branch)? How could we help?
>>
>> VLC 4.0 should build out of the box for Windows ARM. It should build
>> like the other Windows targets except adding `-a aarch64` to build.sh.
>> It should work with the LLVM Dockers we use (or any llvm-mingw build).
>> Not sure there's mingw-w64 for ARM available.
>>
> 
> Indeed, gcc does not yet support Windows on Arm (wip by Zac Walker at 
> Linaro), so llvm-mingw should be used for now.
> 
>> There may be some contribs that don't build properly, for example Qt may
>> refuse to build or not understand what's going on. And if it builds it's
>> not 100% guaranteed to work. But we have Android and iOS stable builds
>> for arm64 that already validate a lot of our code.
>>
>>> Notably, we have machines available Windows on Arm machines available in
>>> our lab and on Azure, if you are lacking them.
>>
>> I have a machine to test. I just never took the time to work on it.
> 
> What are the steps to provide an up to date VLC version on download 
> page? Reproduce on our side, create artifact, and transmit it to you?

We could provide nightlies for now. The steps to do that is first create 
a build target in our CI and when it works, add one for the nightlies 
build. The rest should be automatic.

The "when it works" might be the tricky part.