This file describes how to produce the FFmpeg include directory, and how to create the ffmpeg.gyp file and related configurations. -- FFmpeg headers in the 'include' directory. The include directory contains FFmpeg's public header files from the output of a "make install" command. The header files are from Chromium's copy of FFmpeg. Steps to reproduce: 1) If on Windows, refer to our MinGW/MSYS environment setup: http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/deps/third_party/mingw/ 2) Grab Chromium's copy of FFmpeg: http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/deps/third_party/ffmpeg/ 3) Follow the instructions to build and install. 4) Go to your install location and copy the following into the Chromium tree: /path/to/install/include/libavcodec /path/to/install/include/libavformat /path/to/install/include/libavutil The project contains some hand-written DEF files used to generate import libraries to permit dynamically loading FFmpeg. On Windows, the libraries are linked in using /DELAYLOAD to avoid having the DLLs present at run-time. On POSIX systems, dlopen() is used to achieve a similar effect. We don't use the import libraries generated from building FFmpeg because they export every method by ordinal, which makes binary compatibility with different builds of FFmpeg difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, it is much easier to update a DEF file instead of rebuilding FFmpeg to generate new import libraries. -- Recreating the ffmpeg.gyp file and populating the config directory. The ffmpeg.gyp file is meant to be used in place of FFmpeg's ./configure && make steps. The file was created by inspecting the build log from above. The FFmpeg build is relatively straightforward. All files are built with the same CFLAGS. The config.h and version.h files are the only files generated by ./configure that are included elsewhere. They require a small bit of post-processing. Other than the configure step, FFmpeg just compiles its .c files, assembles a few more using yasm, and that's it. Exact instructions for reproducing ffmpeg.gyp are in the "Detailed Directions" section. Here is a list of gotchas that have shown up. 1) FFmpeg requires special configure (--disable-optimizations) in order to be built with -O0 successfully due to some of the hand-written assembler using ebp. -O0 implies -fno-omit-frame-pointer which breaks this. This will produce compiler errors like: libavcodec/cabac.h:527: error: can't find a register in class 'GENERAL_REGS' while reloading 'asm' cabac.h:527: error: 'asm' operand has impossible constraints 2) On ia32, FFmpeg cannot be built with -fPIC, again due to assembly issues. There may be a workaround, but the performance impact is unknown. 3) Sometimes, with -O0, invalid code will be exposed because dead-branch pruning is disabled in gcc. This can manifest itself as strange link issues or compile issues. Be careful to read all warnings in this case. 4) Since config.h is generated via ./configure, the generated file will be sensitive to the configuration of the machine it was produced on. In particular, yasm does not seem to always be detected if cross-compiling for 32-bit on a 64-bit machine. Since yasm is built in tree, make sure to force things with --enable-yasm. 5) Similar to issue #4, ./configure may detect the presence of SDL and adjust config.h accordingly. This is harmless because all the SDL related code has been disabled in our configuration. 6) On ia32, we want to be able to compile with WITHOUT -fomit-frame-pointer (so breakpad can function). To do this, we need to disable the use of the EBP register, otherwise some of FFmpeg's inline assembly will cause compilation errors similar to gotcha #1. For more details, see the file comment in the munge_config_optimizations.sh. This script will fix up the generated config.h to be building without -fomit-frame-pointer. Detailed Directions: 1) Get a clean version of the patched tree. This should be here: src/third_party/ffmpeg/source/patched-ffmpeg-mt 2) Run the configure in a directory out of the tree with the arguments you want. To see what was used before, find the config.h for the platform of interest in: src/third_party/ffmpeg/source/config/[branding]/[platform]/[variant] The value of the FFMPEG_CONFIGURATION macro should have the configure commandline that generated the file. Note that if you are trying to build a 32-bit FFmpeg for linux on a 64-bit box, the extra flags you want to pass to ./configure are --arch=i686 --extra-cflags=-m32 --extra-ldflags=-m32 Also, as noted in gotcha #4, explicitly setting --enable-yasm is a good idea. 3) Copy the newly generated config.h and version.h into the correct platform location: src/third_party/ffmpeg/source/config/[branding]/[platform]/[variant] Make sure to double-check that config.h and version.h are the only files of interest. By that, I mean check that the other generated files are makefiles, documentation, .pc files, or something else that is not relevant to our build. TODO(ajwong): Check if we can modify version.h to tag our builds. 3b) If on ia32, handle gotcha #6 by munging the geneated config.h file to disable use of EBP. Call the munge_config_optimizations.sh script on the config.h for each ia32 variant. ** This script is not idempotent. Don't run it twice ** Remember, this is only necessary for ia32 config.h files. Running this on config.h files for other platforms (in particular, for x64) will likely result in unecessarily slow code, or compile failures. 4) Next, capture all the output from a build of libavcodec.so and libavformat.so. We will use the build log as a reference for making the ffmpeg.gyp file. make libavcodec/libavcodec.so libavformat/libavformat.so \ > ffmpeg_build_log 2> ffmpeg_build_err For Mac, replace the ".so" in the files above with ".dylib". 5) Check ffmpeg_build_err to see if there are any significant anomalies. FFmpeg source generates a lot of compiler warnings; it is safe to ignore those. 6) Examine all non-gcc commands to see if we're missing anything interesting: grep -v '^gcc' ffmpeg_build_log There should be yasm commands for assembling two yasm files, but nothing else. Include those yasm files in the sources list for gyp. That means grep -v '^gcc\|^yasm' should generate nothing beyond "cd" and "ln" commands. 7) Verify that the all the gcc commands have the same compiler flags. Do that with the following "one-liner": grep - '^gcc' ffmpeg_build_log | grep -v ' -MM ' | grep -v ' -shared ' | sed -e 's/ -o .*$//' | sort | uniq -c This should find all gcc commands, exclude the dependency generation lines, the link lines, and strip the output/input file names leaving just the compiler flags + invocation. You should only see one "line" of output. If there is more than one, figure out if the differences in compiler flags are significant, and then use your best judgment. Look at gotcha #2 in for notes about the -fPIC flag in particular. 8) Examine the output from step 7 and update the compiler flags in ffmpeg.gyp. For easier cut/paste, append the following to the previous command line to isolate each flag on its own line and add single-quotes: tr -s ' ' | tr ' ' '\n' | sed -e "s/\(.*\)/'\1',/" | sort -u 9) Next, examine the link flags to see if anything interesting appears. grep ' -shared ' ffmpeg_build_log | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -Ev '^[^-].*' | grep -v rpath | grep -Ev '^-L' | sort -u This should find all link lines, move each flag to its own line, remove any argument that isn't a flag, remove all the rpaths (not useful for us anyways), and remove all the -L lines (also not useful for us). The most interesting will likely be the -Wl,.* lines. Update the ldflags section in ffmpeg.gyp accordingly. 10) Lastly, Find all the build .c files and update the sources line (this is very similar to step 7): grep -E '^gcc' ffmpeg_build_log | grep -v ' -MM ' | grep -v ' -shared ' | sed -e "s|.* -o .* \(.*\)$|'source/patched-ffmpeg-mt/\1',|" | sort 11) Attempt to build. :) *12) Update the the sources! clause to exclude files that should only be built for Chromium. For this, you basically need to do the steps above once with the configure options for Chrome, then once with the options for Chromium and diff the list of .c and .asm source files.