[FFmpeg-devel] Re: Consider using CMake.

[James Almer via ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org>]

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On 1/23/2026 7:47 PM, crueter via ffmpeg-devel wrote:
> Recently, I've been attempting to get FFmpeg building on MSVC. Normally 
> FFmpeg is built with MinGW for Windows, but it is 100% possible to build 
> it on MSVC. For those curious, I need this as a *static* library, and 
> attempting to link statically built MinGW libraries on MSVC generally 
> doesn't make for a fun time.
> 
> However, previously I had to rely on several horrible hacks, such as 
> running everything through the MSYS shell (not ideal in the slightest), 
> and then manually implanting `cl.exe` and others into PATH. This is not 
> only a huge pain, but actually caused significant problems as it made it 
> much harder to make pretty much any changes whatsoever without 
> inevitably breaking everything.

I'm fairly sure you're required to use an environment like Msys2 to 
compile FFmpeg. Looking at 
https://fate.ffmpeg.org/report.cgi?slot=amd64-msvc&time=20260123104905 i 
see compiling statically with msvc is not a problem.
The configure script has plenty of msvc specific considerations. You may 
have forgotten to to pass --toolchain=msvc to it.

> 
> Thus, when I had to make some significant changes to my script, I ended 
> up facing a large number of issues. In no particular order:
> 
>   * pkg-config is basically nonexistent on Windows, and is barely
>     functional when it does exist. This was a problem for Vulkan,
>     ffnvcodec, openssl, and others.

Every package we check for with pkg-config will have a .pc file on a 
Windows install as it will on a Linux one. But i suspect quite a few 
will require you to build them with mingw-w64, though.

Keep in mind that pkg-config requires you to pass --static to get the 
proper command line arguments to link to dependencies statically. In the 
context of ffmpeg configure, that'd be done with 
--pkg-config-flags="--static".


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