Building and Developing GStreamer using Visual Studio

Two months ago, I talked about how we at Centricular have been working on a Meson port of GStreamer and its basic dependencies (glib, libffi, and orc) for various reasons — faster builds, better cross-platform support (particularly Windows), better toolchain support, ease of use, and for a better build system future in general.

Meson also has built-in support for things like gtk-doc, gobject-introspection, translations, etc. It can even generate Visual Studio project files at build time so projects don't have to expend resources maintaining those separately.

Today I'm here to share instructions on how to use Cerbero (our “aggregating” build system) to build all of GStreamer on Windows using MSVC 2015 (wherever possible). Note that this means you won't see any Meson invocations at all because Cerbero does all that work for you.

Note that this is still all unofficial and has not been proposed for inclusion upstream. We still have a few issues that need to be ironed out before we can do that¹.

Update: As of March 2019, all these instructions are obsolete since MSVC support has been merged into upstream Cerbero. I'm leaving this outdated text as-is for archival purposes.

First, you need to setup the environment on Windows by installing a bunch of external tools: Python 2, Python3, Git, etc. You can find the instructions for that here:

https://github.com/centricular/cerbero#windows

This is very similar to the old Cerbero instructions, but some new tools are needed. Once you've done everything there (Visual Studio especially takes a while to fetch and install itself), the next step is fetching Cerbero:

$ git clone https://github.com/centricular/cerbero.git

This will clone and checkout the meson-1.8 branch that will build GStreamer 1.8.x. Next, we bootstrap it:

https://github.com/centricular/cerbero#bootstrap

Now we're (finally) ready to build GStreamer. Just invoke the package command:

python2 cerbero-uninstalled -c config/win32-mixed-msvc.cbc package gstreamer-1.0

This will build all the `recipes` that constitute GStreamer, including the core libraries and all the plugins including their external dependencies. This comes to about 76 recipes. Out of all these recipes, only the following are ported to Meson and are built with MSVC:

bzip2.recipe
orc.recipe
libffi.recipe (only 32-bit)
glib.recipe
gstreamer-1.0.recipe
gst-plugins-base-1.0.recipe
gst-plugins-good-1.0.recipe
gst-plugins-bad-1.0.recipe
gst-plugins-ugly-1.0.recipe

The rest still mostly use Autotools, plain GNU make or cmake. Almost all of these are still built with MinGW. The only exception is libvpx, which uses its custom make-based build system but is built with MSVC.

Eventually we want to build everything including all external dependencies with MSVC by porting everything to Meson, but as you can imagine it's not an easy task. :-)

However, even with just these recipes, there is a large improvement in how quickly you can build all of GStreamer inside Cerbero on Windows. For instance, the time required for building gstreamer-1.0.recipe which builds gstreamer.git went from 10 minutes to 45 seconds. It is now easier to do GStreamer development on Windows since rebuilding doesn't take an inordinate amount of time!

As a further improvement for doing GStreamer development on Windows, for all these recipes (except libffi because of complicated reasons), you can also generate Visual Studio 2015 project files and use them from within Visual Studio for editing, building, and so on.

Go ahead, try it out and tell me if it works for you!

As an aside, I've also been working on some proper in-depth documentation of Cerbero that explains how the tool works, the recipe format, supported configurations, and so on. You can see the work-in-progress if you wish to.

1. Most importantly, the tests cannot be built yet because GStreamer bundles a very old version of libcheck. I'm currently working on fixing that.