Write your first FFmpeg program on Windows

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It’s not difficult to write your own simple video editor with it.

This post will give you a guide, how to write a program with FFmpeg on Windows, with Visual Studio.

Download FFmpeg library and development files

In general, for an Open Source library, we may usually need build one from source code. And on Windows, it could be kind of confusing.

Luckily, there is a nice hacker, who has built FFmpeg on Windows for us.

We can find them on https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/.

What we need is two linking type files on Windows. So, for “Architecture”, Windows-32bits or Windows-64bits. And in linking, we need dev and shared. Shared library can proivde runtime for the compiled program, meanwhile, in dev, we will have header files and exported symbol information to use during development.

Create VS Project

Create a new Visual C++ project, do not use precompiled header file.

Then, right click on the project to open Property panel.

DLL files

Add your ffmpeg-<version>-win64-shared\bin into your system PATH.

Include files

Add your ffmpeg-<version>-win64-dev\include into VC++ Directory -> Include directory.

Lib files

Add your ffmpeg-<version>-win64-dev\lib into VC++ Directory -> Reference directory.

Add swscale.lib, avutil.lib, avformat.lib, avcodec.lib, avdevice.lib, avfilter.lib, swresample.lib and postproc.lib into Linker -> Input -> Addons.

Code

This code comes from FFmpeg samples, it works as a video decoder but it just gets and prints video meta information.

#include <stdio.h>

#include <libavformat/avformat.h>
#include <libavutil/dict.h>

int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
    AVFormatContext *fmt_ctx = NULL;
    AVDictionaryEntry *tag = NULL;
    int ret;

    if (argc != 2) {
        printf("usage: %s <input_file>\n"
               "example program to demonstrate the use of the libavformat metadata API.\n"
               "\n", argv[0]);
        return 1;
    }

    if ((ret = avformat_open_input(&fmt_ctx, argv[1], NULL, NULL)))
        return ret;

    if ((ret = avformat_find_stream_info(fmt_ctx, NULL)) < 0) {
        av_log(NULL, AV_LOG_ERROR, "Cannot find stream information\n");
        return ret;
    }

    while ((tag = av_dict_get(fmt_ctx->metadata, "", tag, AV_DICT_IGNORE_SUFFIX)))
        printf("%s=%s\n", tag->key, tag->value);

    avformat_close_input(&fmt_ctx);
    return 0;
}

Launch

To run it in Visual Studio, in debugging, add the path of your video into command line arguments.

And right click on the green triangle.

In the terminal, you should be able to see the meta information like this:

major_brand=mp42
minor_version=0
compatible_brands=mp41isom
creation_time=2019-08-25T20:22:43.000000Z

Enjoy!