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: http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net.

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 Note that MinGW environments included in Linux distributions are often broken, outdated and useless, and usually don't use MinGW-w64.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 (http://www.mingw.org) is unsupported.

Cross-compilation

When cross-compiling, you have to run mpv's configure with these arguments:

DEST_OS=win32 TARGET=i686-w64-mingw32 ./waf configure

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 mingw-w64-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
#
#    http://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
# mpv.

make gcc ffmpeg libass jpeg pthreads

# 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
DEST_OS=win32 TARGET=i686-w64-mingw32.static ./waf configure
# Or, if 64 bit version,
# DEST_OS=win32 TARGET=x86_64-w64-mingw32.static ./waf configure
./waf 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://msys2.github.io/

It doesn't matter whether the i686 or the x86_64 version is used. Both can build 32-bit and 64-bit binaries when running on a 64-bit version of Windows.
Add C:\msys64\mingw64\bin to your %PATH%. mpv will depend on several DLLs in this folder.
Start a MinGW-w64 shell (mingw64_shell.bat). For a 32-bit build, use mingw32_shell.bat.

Updating MSYS2

To prevent errors during post-install, msys2-runtime and pacman must be updated first.

# Check for updates to msys2-runtime and pacman. If there were updates, restart
# MSYS2 before continuing.
pacman -Sy --needed msys2-runtime pacman

# Update everything else
pacman -Su

Installing mpv dependencies

# Install MSYS2 build dependencies and a MinGW-w64 compiler
pacman -S git pkg-config python3 mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc

# Install the most important MinGW-w64 dependencies. libass, libbluray and
# lcms2 are also pulled in as dependencies of ffmpeg.
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-ffmpeg mingw-w64-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo mingw-w64-x86_64-lua

# Install additional (optional) dependencies
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-libdvdnav mingw-w64-x86_64-mpg123 mingw-w64-x86_64-libguess

For a 32-bit build, install mingw-w64-i686-* packages instead.

Building mpv

Clone the latest mpv from git and install waf:

git clone https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv.git && cd mpv
./bootstrap.py

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

# For a 32-bit build, use --prefix=/mingw32 instead
./waf configure CC=gcc --prefix=/mingw64
./waf install

Or, compile and install both libmpv and mpv:

./waf configure CC=gcc --enable-libmpv-shared --prefix=/mingw64
./waf install

# waf installs libmpv to the wrong directory, so fix it up
mv -f /mingw64/bin/pkgconfig/mpv.pc /mingw64/lib/pkgconfig/
mv -f /mingw64/bin/libmpv.dll.a /mingw64/lib/
sed -i 's_/mingw64/bin_/mingw64/lib_' /mingw64/lib/pkgconfig/mpv.pc
rmdir /mingw64/bin/pkgconfig

Additional dependencies

pthreads

mpv will use a pthreads wrapper by default. Either pthreads-win32 or winpthreads should work. The latter is packaged with most MinGW-w64 environments, including MSYS2, so it shouldn't be a problem. If you don't have a pthreads wrapper or you want to build mpv without one, configure with:

./waf configure --enable-win32-internal-pthreads

libwaio

If you want to use --input-file, you need libwaio. It's available from git://midipix.org/waio

To compile libwaio in MSYS2, run:

git clone git://midipix.org/waio && cd waio

# 32-bit build, run from mingw32_shell.bat
./build-mingw-nt32 lib-static CC=gcc AR=ar
cp -r include/waio /mingw32/include
cp lib32/libwaio.a /mingw32/lib

# 64-bit build, run from mingw64_shell.bat
./build-mingw-nt64 lib-static CC=gcc AR=ar
cp -r include/waio /mingw64/include
cp lib64/libwaio.a /mingw64/lib

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