VLC_3.0.3 SDK win32

== ACTIVEX Control for VLC == The VLC ActiveX Control has been primary designed to work with Internet Explorer. However it may also work with Visual Basic and/or .NET. Please note, that this code does not rely upon Microsoft MFC/ATL code, hence good compatibility is not guaranteed. I. Compiling The ActiveX Control should compile without any glitches as long as you have the latest version of mingw gcc and headers. In order to script the ActiveX Control on Internet Explorer, a type library is required. This type library is usually generated from an IDL file using Microsoft MIDL compiler. Therefore, for convenience I have checked in the output of the MIDL compiler in the repository so that you will only need the MIDL compiler if you change axvlc.idl. the generated files are as follow: axvlc_idl.c axvlc_idl.h axvlc.tlb To use the MIDL compiler on cygwin, you will need to set some environment variables before configuring vlc. If you have a copy of 'Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0' installed, the following settings are correct: export PATH=$PATH:"/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/COMMON/MSDev98/Bin":"/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/Bin" export INCLUDE='C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Include' export MIDL="midl" If you are cross-compiling on Linux, you can use 'widl' which is part of the WINE project (http://www.winehq.com). At leat wine-dev-0.9.57 works, the comand line to compile IDL should looks like the following : widl -I/usr/include/wine/windows/ \ -h -H axvlc_idl.h -t -T axvlc.tlb -u -U axvlc_idl.c axvlc.idl NOTE: widl breaks compatibility with Visual Basic. If that is important to you then you must use midl. II. Debugging The ActiveX control is compiled with verbose output by default, but you will need to launch Internet Explorer from a Cygwin shell to see the output. Alternatively, the plugin will also use the VLC preferences, so if you enable the file logging interface through the player and save the preferences, the control will automatically log its verbose output into the designated file. Debugging the ActiveX control DLL with GNU GDB can be difficult. Fortunately the ActiveX control can also be compiled as an executable rather than a DLL. In ActiveX terms, this is called a local server. The advantage of a local server is that it will never crash its client, i.e. Internet Explorer, even if the local server crashes. The build system does not currently allow to create an executable version of the ActiveX control, you will need to manually define the BUILD_LOCALSERVER pre-processor variable and modify the Makefile to exclude the '-shared' option at the linking stage. Once this is done, launch axvlc.exe to have a working Activex control. Please note, that executable version of the ActiveX control will override any settings required for the DLL version, which will no longer work until you (re)register it as shown in the following section III. Local Install The VLC NSIS installer will install the ActiveX Control without requiring any further manual intervention, but for people who like to live on the edge, here are the steps you need to perform once you have built the ActiveX Control. The ActiveX control DLL file may be copied anywhere on the target machine, but before you can use the control, you will need to register it with Windows by using the REGSVR32 command, as per following example: REGSVR32 C:\WINDOWS\AXVLC.DLL If the control needs to use external VLC plugins (i.e other than the built-in ones), make sure that the plugin path is set in the registry as per following example: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VideoLAN\VLC] InstallDir="C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC" The InstallDir must be the parent directory of the 'plugins' directory. WARNING: Both control and plugins must come from the same source build tree. Otherwise, at best, the control will not play any content, at worse it may crash Internet Explorer while attempting to load incompatible plugins. IV. Internet Install The activex control may be installed from a remote through Internet Installer if it is packaged up in a CAB file. The following link explains how to achieve this http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/components/activex/packaging.asp For convenience, I have provided a sample axvlc.INF file, which assumes that the VLC NSIS Installer has been packaged up a CAB file called AXVLC.CAB. The ActiveX Control DLL file can also be distributed by itself if it has been compiled with built-in VLC plugins; check developer information for more information on built-in plugins.