compiling FFMPEG with libx264... in MSYS.

[Mug Funky]

i've been googling quite a lot, and unfortunately can't seem to find this specific topic covered.

i'm using ffmpeg/avconv (i'm using both really, as there's often features in one that haven't made it into the other) for a lot of fancy encoding tasks using libx264.

recently, i stupidly updated my msys, and now i cannot get ffmpeg's configure to find libx264. i get "ERROR: libx264 not found". pkg-config --list-all reveals that it exists and is findable, and ffmpeg will configure and compile without it, but i really really want to have a working ffmpeg with libx264 in it...

i've followed various compiling guides and reinstalled my msys environment many, many times, but somehow i seem to have lost the ability to do what i want.

i'm not a coder - just barely a compiler, so i was wondering if anyone was doing this successfully from the current git versions of ffmpeg, libav, and x264.

thanks!

[edit]

btw, i don't really have the option to just do it in linux - this is a work computer and stuck in 32 bit winxp. installing cygwin would be a bit sledgehammer-to-crack-an-egg, but i'll do it if there's no other way. i could try on my ubuntu eeepc, but i'd lose the ability to fprofile meaningfully on the machine i'm actually going to run it on.

[J_Darnley]

What does config.log say? I think I'm going to guess at a mismatch between pthreads and win32 threads.

[Mug Funky]

oh, i've read a little of that pthreads thing while googling for this issue, but tried compiling without threads for both libx264 and ffmpeg and didn't seem to get anywhere with it. i'll definitely give it a shot.

i'm just running a make clean and running configure again to give you a log file (i've since compiled this tree without libx264 so i could rush out some mpeg-2 stuff).

if this is a pthreads thing, what would be a good way to fix it?

here's the last bit of config.log:

gcc -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -U__STRICT_ANSI__ -std=c99 -fno-common -fomit-frame-pointer -c -o /tmp/ffconf.HAcWEfVO.o /tmp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c
gcc -Wl,--as-needed -o /tmp/ffconf.pRVOZOgl.exe /tmp/ffconf.HAcWEfVO.o -lm -lbz2 -lz -lpsapi
check_mathfunc truncf
check_ld cc
check_cc
BEGIN /tmp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c
    1	#include <math.h>
    2	float foo(float f) { return truncf(f); }
    3	int main(void){ return (int) foo; }
END /tmp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c
gcc -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -U__STRICT_ANSI__ -std=c99 -fno-common -fomit-frame-pointer -c -o /tmp/ffconf.HAcWEfVO.o /tmp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c
gcc -Wl,--as-needed -o /tmp/ffconf.pRVOZOgl.exe /tmp/ffconf.HAcWEfVO.o -lm -lbz2 -lz -lpsapi
check_lib x264.h x264_encoder_encode -lx264
check_header x264.h
check_cpp
BEGIN /tmp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c
    1	#include <x264.h>
    2	int x;
END /tmp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c
gcc -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -U__STRICT_ANSI__ -std=c99 -fno-common -fomit-frame-pointer -E -o /tmp/ffconf.HAcWEfVO.o /tmp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c
C:/DOCUME~1/<myname>/LOCALS~1/Temp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c:1:18: fatal error: x264.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
ERROR: libx264 not found

i'm not sure why it's referring something in my local settings folder when nothing else appears to... quite strange.

[J_Darnley]

Okay, I was wrong about the threads issue.

Originally Posted by Mug Funky

C:/DOCUME~1/<myname>/LOCALS~1/Temp/ffconf.PZXVhpnj.c:1:18: fatal error: x264.h: No such file or directory

Did you install x264? Where did you install it to? Does gcc know to look there for it? You should either set up your environment so that gcc looks in this place for it or use: --extra-cflags=-I/path/to/x264/header --extra-ldflags=-L/path/to/x264/library

[Mug Funky]

oh, really? i thought pkg-config would deal with that stuff.

i've had it work in the past, but it's possible it was picking up a different x264 than the git version i had been compiling.

i'll try the flags you've given me. i never could figure out what all those ldflags and stuff meant. i'll let you know tomorrow when i get to my winxp machine.

thanks!

[JEEB]

I usually use a standard msys folder setup, where a mingw toolchain of my choice mounted into /mingw, and set my --prefix to /mingw/<32bit/64bit cross-prefix in your toolchain>/ (or somewhere separate in case something needs separation).

Then I use some pre-made pkg-config binary and usually set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable accordingly to my setup (PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/herp/derp/lib/pkgconfig f.ex.) when running configuration scripts. I don't remember in which case this would be needed, but I also remember making copies of the pkg-config binary with the cross-prefixes that have to be set separately (usually 64bit cross-prefixes). I think this was for configuration scripts that wouldn't fall back on the non-prefixed pkg-config binary.

Also, as far as cflags and ldflags go, in most cases the stuff you'll get to meet at one point are -l, -L (ldflags) and -I (a cflag). Small L tells the linker to link to a certain library (in general, the compiler option -lNAME will attempt to link object files with a library file ‘libNAME.a’ in the linker's pre-set library search path, although of course you can specify a file name or even a full path), and the big L tells the linker to look for the libraries in an additional directory (-L/herp/derp/lib). Large I on the other hand adds directories to the header search path (-I/herp/derp/include). And indeed, pkg-config can save you from the headache of dealing with these things, in case pkg-config is used accordingly.

[J_Darnley]

Originally Posted by Mug Funky

oh, really? i thought pkg-config would deal with that stuff.

In that case, did you tell pkg-config where you installed x264 to? I'm sure JEEB's answer will help you with that.

[Mug Funky]

$ pkg-config --list-all
liblzma       liblzma - General purpose data compression library
libswscale    libswscale - FFmpeg image rescaling library
libavutil     libavutil - FFmpeg utility library
libavdevice   libavdevice - FFmpeg device handling library
libavformat   libavformat - FFmpeg container format library
libavcodec    libavcodec - FFmpeg codec library
openssl       OpenSSL - Secure Sockets Layer and cryptography libraries and tools
libpostproc   libpostproc - FFmpeg postprocessing library
libavresample libavresample - Libav audio resampling library
ffms          ffms2-avs-cplugin - The Fabulous FM Library
guile-1.8     GNU Guile - GNU's Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extension
libarchive    libarchive - library that can create and read several streaming archive formats
libcrypto     OpenSSL-libcrypto - OpenSSL cryptography library
libxml-2.0    libXML - libXML library version2.
zlib          zlib - zlib compression library
libavfilter   libavfilter - FFmpeg video filtering library
x264          x264 - H.264 (MPEG4 AVC) encoder library
autoopts      AutoOpts - A semi-automated generated/library option parser
libswresample libswresample - FFmpeg audio rescaling library
libssl        OpenSSL - Secure Sockets Layer and cryptography libraries

not sure what the deal is there, if pkg-config is supposed to pick everything up. i wouldn't rule out something being whack in my setup though. i just got into work so i haven't tried manually pointing configure to where x264 is installed at.

[edit]

$ ./configure --disable-everything --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --extra-cflags=-I/local/lib --extra-ldflags=-L/local/lib
ERROR: libx264 not found

i guess i'm still doing it wrong. i've half a mind to just nuke msys and mingw and start again, but i have a suspicion that will not help.

[qyot27]

I tested here, with an MSys that does not have x264 or FFmpeg locally installed. I can verify that the 'cannot find libx264' error occurs as per the thread topic. I don't think it's anything you're doing wrong, I'm more inclined to blame MSys.

However, I was able to get around it by using custom prefixes*. I'm guessing that FFmpeg doesn't like the fact that MSys treats the entire root as /usr, and therefore it doesn't want to treat /local/lib and /local/include as valid search paths. This is why it's probably advisable to install x264 to your MinGW installation rather than the default location(s), like JEEB said. I'm not sure if explicitly giving it -I/usr/local/include and -L/usr/local/lib for your --extra-*flags arguments would work, but maybe it's worth trying.

*in my case,
x264:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/win32_build --enable-strip --enable-static
make
make install

FFmpeg:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/win32_build --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --disable-w32threads \
--enable-memalign-hack --enable-avisynth --enable-libx264 --cpu=pentium3 \
--extra-cflags="-I$HOME/win32_build/include -march=pentium3 -mtune=pentium3 -DPTW32_STATIC_LIB" \
--extra-ldflags="-L$HOME/win32_build/lib"

and I'm not going to attempt running make because it takes almost 2 hours to compile FFmpeg on here, and that's when I'm on Linux. Who knows how long it'd take using MSys.

But to break it down, FFmpeg is told to look for x264's include/lib in the relevant subdirectories of $HOME/win32_build. It doesn't have any issues with this.

[Maccara]

Originally Posted by qyot27

I'm not sure if explicitly giving it -I/usr/local/include and -L/usr/local/lib for your --extra-*flags arguments would work, but maybe it's worth trying.

It should work. In my build env I have these kinds of vars for x264 config (I don't install any of the libs ever, they're always copied from build artifacts to local build dir):

...
SOURCE_DIR=`pwd`
COMMONOPTS="--enable-win32thread --enable-static --enable-strip --extra-cflags=-I${SOURCE_DIR}/lib/include --extra-ldflags=-L${SOURCE_DIR}/lib/lib"
PREFIX="--prefix=${SOURCE_DIR}/dist"
...
CONFIGURE="nice -19 ./configure $PREFIX $CROSSPREFIX $HOST $COMMONOPTS"
...

Works just fine.

I do the same thing for ffmpeg.

Edit: forgot I have for ffmpeg used also:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH="${SOURCE_DIR}/lib/lib/pkgconfig"
...separate hosts (depending on config) get also...
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}:/mingw/i686-w64-mingw32/lib/pkgconfig"
...
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH