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Hacking vlc

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 - Read this file

 - Read the information present on http://www.videolan.org/developers/
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You will need the following tools if you plan to use the GIT version of vlc:

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 - Autoconf version 2.60 or later
 - Automake version 1.9 or later
 - gettext version 0.16.1 or later
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 - pkg-config
 - libgcrypt 1.2 (or compatible)

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After retrieving the GIT tree, you need to run the bootstrap script to
generate all the files needed to build vlc. You can then run configure.
Run ./configure --help for a description of the available options.
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If you do not have the correct version of these tools, or if they are
simply not available for the operating system you plan to develop on,
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you can check out a GIT tree on an OS that provides these tools (such
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as a recent Linux distribution), run bootstrap, and then copy the whole
tree to your retarded OS.

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There is a possibility that, at some point, automake might segfault. The
reason is unsufficient stack size, and can be easily fixed with the
`ulimit` command (or an equivalent) available in most shells. For instance
on bash 2.0, the following command solves the automake crash on Mac OS X :
ulimit -s 20000

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The bootstrap sequence

The bootstrap script does the following actions:

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 - parse configure.ac for all Makefiles in the modules/ directory that need
   to be generated, and look for available modules in the corresponding
   Modules.am file. A module "foo" exists if there is a Modules.am file in
   the modules/ directory which defines SOURCES_foo.
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 - create a top-level Modules.am file (which will be included by Makefile.am)
   which contains additional build rules for modules, and includes all the
   Modules.am files that were found in modules/

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 - create an m4/private.m4 from configure.ac, generating m4 macros that will
   be needed by configure.ac.

 - create a Makefile.am file for each Modules.am file found in modules/ .

 - run autopoint (previously gettextize) to create an intl/ directory,
   needed when libgettext is not available.

 - run the usual aclocal, autoheader, automake and autoconf, which create
   the various Makefile.in files from the corresponding Makefile.am and the
   configure script from configure.ac.

 - fix a few files in the vlc repository that may have been altered.

How to add a module

To add a module to the repository, just add its sources to a Modules.am
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file. If you add a new directory you will need to create a new Modules.am,
inside that directory. Do not forget to add a corresponding
Makefile line at the end of configure.ac for this new Modules.am file.

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To have the module built, you need to add a call to VLC_ADD_PLUGINS or
VLC_ADD_BUILTINS to configure.ac with your new module name as argument.
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Look at other modules for guidelines on how to add build and linkage options.

After changing configure.ac you will always need to rerun bootstrap and 

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VLC keeps a cache of its module (in ~/.vlc/cache on Linux), so you'll have to delete it. (or use vlc --reset-plugins-cache)
Then use vlc -vvv --color --list to check that your plugin is seen by VLC.