Using FFMpeg in Microsoft Visual C++ Environment

By Denny50 |28 Jan 2007 | Unedited contribution

Integrate ffmpeg library into your visual C++ project.

• Required Header Files - 5 Kb

Introduction

FFMpeg is a free video library that can record and convert audio and video data. FFMpeg is under GNU Lesser General Public License, but FFMpeg also uses some third part library which maybe under GNU General Public License. So before using FFMpeg library, you'd better spend some time on the license.

FFMpeg includes the following librarys

libavcodec: All of the video and audio encoders and decoders.

libavformat: Demuxers and muxers for audio and video formats.

libavutil: Useful utils of FFMpeg

Get FFMpeg Source Code

There are no formal release of FFMpeg, however, you can get FFMpeg source code on a daily basic.

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svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk

For example, you can checkout source code using TortoiseSVN,

Compiling FFMpeg

FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems.

For Windows, FFMpeg can be compilied by MSYS and MingGW. If you had setup MSYS and MingGW system correctly, you can compile FFMpeg under it's folder.

1. Cleanup former build results.

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make distclean

2. Setup build parameters.

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./configure --enable-shared --disable-static --enable-memalign-hack

If there are no errors, and config.mak and config.h generated, you can build the library, and then, if you want, you can install them into MSYS environment.

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make
make install

Using FFMpeg in Your Visual C++ Environment

1. Create inttypes.h and stdint.h if you don't have them. Attachment is a copy of these two files. You can get them from other place if you want.

2. Setting up Additional Include Directories and Additional Library Directories. By default, these folder is under your MSYS folder, for example:

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/usr/local/include
/usr/local/lib

3. Add FFmpeg's shared libraries, include libavutil.lib libavcodec.lib libavformat.lib:

4. Include the FFMpeg header,

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#include <ffmpeg/avformat.h>

#include <ffmpeg/avcodec.h>

Using the FFMpeg code

There are an example within FFMpeg, output_example.c. But if you copied codes from this example, following tips may ensure you compiles successfully.

1. Add required casts.

2. Change snprintf to _snprintf

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here

About the Author

Denny50


Software Developer (Senior)

Australia

Member
Senior software engineer with 10 years experience of C/C++ programming. Now also has some project with C#. I'm from Shanghai and now working at Melbourne. At I spare time, I enjoy my family life. My blog, Childhood is a collection about my family, epically my lovely son. Most of them write in Chinese, and a few in my poor English - please forgive me, I'm improving my English as soon as I can.