[vlc-devel] Support for Windows on Arm

[Martin Storsjö]

On Fri, 9 Sep 2022, Pierrick Bouvier wrote:

> On 9/9/22 10:41, Martin Storsjö wrote:
>> On Fri, 9 Sep 2022, Steve Lhomme wrote:
>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> It has worked with latest VLC from git master, without any out of tree
>> patches, out of the box for the last 3-4 years at least.
>> 
>> This has been brought up numerous times with J-B, it's all just up to
>> Videolan to care to put up builds. (I have nightly builds since forever,
>> but I don't want to use my own test infra for providing public VLC
>> builds.)
>> 
>
> Good to hear you've been running nightlies build all this time!

FWIW, just for the record, you can grab 
https://martin.st/temp/vlc-aarch64-4.0.0-dev-20220904.zip and 
https://martin.st/temp/vlc-aarch64-3.0.18-20220904.zip as snapshots of 
recent nightlies of both active branches - both seem to run fine on a 
casual inspection. (I don't generally do any deeper testing of it than 
trying to play a single simple video from disk though, and that, I only do 
every now and then, even if they're built regularly.)

One potential final remaining thing that I haven't cared about fixing, is 
building installers. I don't know if the tools used for installers support 
aarch64 at all (dunno if it even is NSIS based exes, or MSI files, or 
whatnot). For my builds, I've just distributed zip files (from "make 
package-win32-zip").

> Sure, using your own private machine for that is not a solution.

> If we could provide a physical windows on arm machine (or VM on Azure), would 
> that solve the problem for you? You can get access to it, and we can help 
> with setting this up.

For plain building of VLC, that shouldn't be needed. VLC for Windows is 
best built cross compiled anyway - and that can be done on their existing 
linux based CI. They'd primarily need to add such a build configuration 
and place the builds somewhere.

For actual testing, I do have actual Windows on ARM HW too - but it's old 
and slow - having access to a VM on Azure would certainly come in handy 
every now and then!

// Martin