GStreamer Build Instructions

Setting up your build environment

Setting up on Windows

1. Install Visual Studio 2019 (Free Community Edition works fine). Remember to select the C++ packages.
2. Install Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org).
3. Run the following from command line:

choco install cmake meson ninja python3

4. The installation of Strawberry Perl (needed by other Ultralight deps) conflicts with Meson, you'll need to rename or delete the following paths:

• C:\Strawberry\c
• C:\Strawberry\perl\bin\pkg-config.bat
• C:\Strawberry\perl\bin\pkg-config

Setting up on macOS

1. Install Xcode Command Line Tools (or the full Xcode package).
2. Download the macOS 10.14 Platform SDK from https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs/releases and extract it to /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk.
3. Install Homebrew (https://brew.sh/)
4. Run the following from the Terminal to setup the needed homebrew packages:

brew install cmake meson ninja pcre bison python3

You may need to export the bison path to your bash_profile to make it the first entry in PATH since macOS already provides its own copy of bison.

You can do this by adding the following line to your .bash_profile:

export PATH="/usr/local/opt/bison/bin:$PATH"

Setting up on Linux

To get everything on Linux, just type the following:

sudo apt install cmake meson ninja-build libpcre3-dev bison flex patchelf

Building from source

Build FFmpeg first

You'll first need a built copy of FFmpeg to enable the libav plugin in GStreamer.

Once you've built FFmpeg for your platform, copy the built output (the contents of the out dir) to deps/ffmpeg (relative to this folder).

You can change the path to your built copy of FFmpeg by passing -DFFMPEG_INSTALL_PATH="your/ffmpeg/path/here" to CMake on the command line.

Building on Windows

At present, to build with Visual Studio, you need to run cmake from inside the VS 2019 command prompt. Press Start, and search for VS 2019, and click on x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019, or a prompt named similar to that.

Then, from the x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019, change directories to this folder and run the following:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -GNinja
ninja
ninja install

Building on macOS and Linux

To build for macOS/Linux:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -GNinja
ninja
ninja install

Build products

Build products will be in <build_dir>/out.