[vlc-devel] Support for Windows on Arm

[Pierrick Bouvier]

On 9/9/22 10:58, Martin Storsjö wrote:
> 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.)
> 

Thanks for the links. Did a "video playback" test with an av1 video, 
sounds good.

> 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").
> 

This might not be blocking. The goal is to get a downloadable recent VLC 
version for Windows on Arm. A zip is a good first step.

>> 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!
> 

If you need it intermittently, one of our lab machine can be a good 
solution! (at least, it's "free"). We prefer to use VM when they will be 
used continuously (as it's paid per hour).

> // Martin