Compiling for Windows

Compiling for Windows is supported with MinGW-w64. This can be used to produce both 32-bit and 64-bit executables, and it works for building on Windows and cross-compiling from Linux and Cygwin. MinGW-w64 is available from: https://www.mingw-w64.org/

While building a complete MinGW-w64 toolchain yourself is possible, there are a few build environments and scripts to help ease the process, such as MSYS2 and MXE. Note that MinGW environments included in Linux distributions are often broken, outdated and useless, and usually don't use MinGW-w64.

Warning: the original MinGW (https://osdn.net/projects/mingw/) is unsupported.

Cross-compilation

When cross-compiling, it is recommended to use a meson crossfile to setup the cross compiling environment. A minimal example is included below:

[binaries]
c = 'x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc'
cpp = 'x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++'
ar = 'x86_64-w64-mingw32-ar'
strip = 'x86_64-w64-mingw32-strip'
exe_wrapper = 'wine64'

[host_machine]
system = 'windows'
cpu_family = 'x86_64'
cpu = 'x86_64'
endian = 'little'

See meson's documentation for more information.

MXE makes it very easy to bootstrap a complete MingGW-w64 environment from a Linux machine. See a working example below.

Alternatively, you can try mpv-winbuild-cmake, which bootstraps a MinGW-w64 environment and builds mpv and dependencies.

Example with MXE

# Before starting, make sure you install MXE prerequisites. MXE will download
# and build all target dependencies, but no host dependencies. For example,
# you need a working compiler, or MXE can't build the crosscompiler.
#
# Refer to
#
#    https://mxe.cc/#requirements
#
# Scroll down for disto/OS-specific instructions to install them.

# Download MXE. Note that compiling the required packages requires about 1.4 GB
# or more!

cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/mxe/mxe mxe
cd mxe

# Set build options.

# The JOBS environment variable controls threads to use when building. DO NOT
# use the regular `make -j4` option with MXE as it will slow down the build.
# Alternatively, you can set this in the make command by appending "JOBS=4"
# to the end of command:
echo "JOBS := 4" >> settings.mk

# The MXE_TARGET environment variable builds MinGW-w64 for 32 bit targets.
# Alternatively, you can specify this in the make command by appending
# "MXE_TARGETS=i686-w64-mingw32" to the end of command:
echo "MXE_TARGETS := i686-w64-mingw32.static" >> settings.mk

# If you want to build 64 bit version, use this:
# echo "MXE_TARGETS := x86_64-w64-mingw32.static" >> settings.mk

# Build required packages. The following provide a minimum required to build
# a reasonable mpv binary (though not an absolute minimum).

make gcc ffmpeg libass jpeg lua luajit

# Add MXE binaries to $PATH
export PATH=/opt/mxe/usr/bin/:$PATH

# Build mpv. The target will be used to automatically select the name of the
# build tools involved (e.g. it will use i686-w64-mingw32.static-gcc).

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv.git
cd mpv
meson setup build --crossfile crossfile
meson compile -C build

Native compilation with MSYS2

For Windows developers looking to get started quickly, MSYS2 can be used to compile mpv natively on a Windows machine. The MSYS2 repositories have binary packages for most of mpv's dependencies, so the process should only involve building mpv itself.

To build 64-bit mpv on Windows:

Installing MSYS2

Download an installer from https://www.msys2.org/

Both the i686 and the x86_64 version of MSYS2 can build 32-bit and 64-bit mpv binaries when running on a 64-bit version of Windows, but the x86_64 version is preferred since the larger address space makes it less prone to fork() errors.
Start a MinGW-w64 shell (mingw64.exe). Note: This is different from the MSYS2 shell that is started from the final installation dialog. You must close that shell and open a new one.

For a 32-bit build, use mingw32.exe.

Updating MSYS2

To prevent errors during post-install, the MSYS2 core runtime must be updated separately.

# Check for core updates. If instructed, close the shell window and reopen it
# before continuing.
pacman -Syu

# Update everything else
pacman -Su

Installing mpv dependencies

# Install MSYS2 build dependencies and a MinGW-w64 compiler
pacman -S git $MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX-{python,pkgconf,gcc,meson}

# Install the most important MinGW-w64 dependencies. libass and lcms2 are also
# pulled in as dependencies of ffmpeg.
pacman -S $MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX-{ffmpeg,libjpeg-turbo,luajit}

Building mpv

Finally, compile and install mpv. Binaries will be installed to /mingw64/bin or /mingw32/bin.

meson setup build --prefix=$MSYSTEM_PREFIX
meson compile -C build

Or, compile and install both libmpv and mpv:

meson setup build -Dlibmpv=true --prefix=$MSYSTEM_PREFIX
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

Linking libmpv with MSVC programs

mpv/libmpv cannot be built with Visual Studio (Microsoft is too incompetent to support C99/C11 properly and/or hates open source and Linux too much to seriously do it). But you can build C++ programs in Visual Studio and link them with a libmpv built with MinGW.

To do this, you need a Visual Studio which supports stdint.h (recent ones do), and you need to create a import library for the mpv DLL:

lib /name:mpv-1.dll /out:mpv.lib /MACHINE:X64

The string in the /name: parameter must match the filename of the DLL (this is simply the filename the MSVC linker will use).

Static linking is not possible.

Running mpv

If you want to run mpv from the MinGW-w64 shell, you will find the experience much more pleasant if you use the winpty utility

pacman -S winpty
winpty mpv.com ToS-4k-1920.mov

If you want to move / copy mpv.exe and mpv.com to somewhere other than /mingw64/bin/ for use outside the MinGW-w64 shell, they will still depend on DLLs in that folder. The simplest solution is to add C:\msys64\mingw64\bin to the windows system %PATH%. Beware though that this can cause problems or confusion in Cygwin if that is also installed on the machine.

Use of the ANGLE OpenGL backend requires a copy of the D3D compiler DLL that matches the version of the D3D SDK that ANGLE was built with (d3dcompiler_43.dll in case of MinGW-built ANGLE) in the path or in the same folder as mpv. It must be of the same architecture (x86_64 / i686) as the mpv you compiled.

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