Needed environment for building gstreamer plugins in Windows

Question

Hi,

I've been strugling for two weeks to create an environment for building a gstreamer plugin on windows (needed for a songbird addon).

I've installed MSYS, MinGW and Cygwin, then installed GStreamer OSSBuild, and I also downloaded the sources for Songbird, which come with their own precompiled version of gstreamer.

I was unable to run gst-inspect (or any other gstreamer applications) from the songbird sources and I figured I will settle for OSSBuild (as I was able to run gst-inspect from the compiled OSSBuild).

When following the instructions for building a GST plugin (found here) through, cygwin will not recognize the OSSBuild and the build fails when running autogen, with the following error:

checking for GST... no
configure: error:
      You need to install or upgrade the GStreamer development
      packages on your system. On debian-based systems these are
      libgstreamer0.10-dev and libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev.
      on RPM-based systems gstreamer0.10-devel, libgstreamer0.10-devel
      or similar. The minimum version required is 0.10.16.

configure failed

I could also not use MSYS or MinGW as they are unable to run autogen at all.

I understand that cygwin should have it's own gstreamer development packages but I couldn't find how to install them.

My question: How do I install the gstreamer packages in cygwin or how do I build using cygwin with the OSSBuild dependencies?

In short, how do I get an environment where I can build a gstreamer plugin under windows?

Answer 1

you can install precompiled gstreamer packages for cygwin at cygwinports. there you will find installation instructions and a list of available packages. you should not need to build them from source.

Answer 2

Configure's most likely going to look for libtool (.la) or pkg-config (.pc) files. Since OSSBuild is built using MSVC, you're not likely to get those files so configure can pick them up. However, you can manually create them and set them in a location to be picked up by the script. I do know that OSSBuild does have as its goal to eventually provide Visual Studio-compatible C/C++ project templates for GStreamer plugins as well as libtool and pkg-config files, but they're not available just yet.

If you checkout the OSSBuild source and can follow MSVC property files, you can see how the plugins are setup and configured.