[vlc-devel] Question about VLC build complexity and documentation (academic project – UNICAMP)

[Alexandre Janniaux]

Hi,

I'd still highlight that installing the dependencies and running
../configure works like on linux
when compiling for MacOS, and part of the complexity when compiling
for windows comes
from the fact it's a cross-compilation and not a native compilation.

When compiling for android or iOS, specifying the cross triple can be
enough, but compiling
the additional dependencies from contrib/ to include more feature
necessarily requires a bit
more knowledge since you're compiling a dozen of additional
dependencies. Compiling the
native app is yet another layer of complexity we cannot avoid if you
want the full features,
but is not mandatory either to test the app on iOS, and someday when I
have time on Android
too.

Regards,
--
Alexandre Janniaux
Videolabs

Le mar. 7 oct. 2025 à 20:11, David Fuhrmann <david.fuhrmann at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>
>
> Am 04.10.2025 um 19:18 schrieb José Eduardo Santos Rabelo <j260551 at dac.unicamp.br>:
>
> Hello VLC team,
>
> My name is José Eduardo Rabelo, and I’m a Computer Engineering undergraduate student at UNICAMP (University of Campinas, Brazil).
>
> As part of a university course called Programming Systems Projects, my group is searching for a way to simplify the compilation process of large and dependency-heavy open-source software — with VLC as our case study.
>
> During our attempts to build VLC on macOS and Windows, we found the process quite complex, with many undocumented or outdated steps, especially compared to Linux. This raised an academic and practical question for us:
>
>
> Hi José,
>
> Building for macOS is as simple as just executing one single wrapper build script, see here: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/blob/master/extras/package/macosx/build.sh?ref_type=heads
>
> VLC has an internal contrib system (in contribs subfolder), which take care of building all necessary dependencies.
>
> BR. David
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