Building MKVToolNix 84.0 for Windows

There is currently only one supported way to build MKVToolNix for Windows: on Linux using a MinGW cross compiler. It is known that you can also build it on Windows itself with the MinGW gcc compiler, but that's not supported officially as I don't have such a setup myself.

Earlier versions could still be built with Microsoft's Visual Studio / Visual C++ programs, and those steps were described here as well. However, current MKVToolNix versions require many features of the C++11 and C++14 standards which Microsoft's compilers have had spotty support for for a long time. Additionally the author doesn't use Visual C++ himself and couldn't provide project files for it.

1. Building with a MinGW cross compiler

1.1. Preparations

You will need:

a MinGW cross compiler
roughly 4 GB of free space available

Luckily there's the M cross environment project that provides an easy-to-use way of setting up the cross-compiler and all required libraries.

MXE is a fast-changing project. In order to provide a stable basis for compilation, the author maintains his own fork. That fork also includes a couple of changes that cause libraries to be compiled only with the features required by MKVToolNix saving compilation time and deployment space. In order to retrieve that fork, you need git. Then do the following:

git clone https://gitlab.com/mbunkus/mxe $HOME/mxe

The rest of this guide assumes that you've unpacked MXE into the directory $HOME/mxe.

1.2. Automatic build script

MKVToolNix contains a script that can download, compile and install all required libraries into the directory $HOME/mxe.

If the script does not work or you want to do everything yourself, you'll find instructions for manual compilation in section 1.3.

1.2.1. Script configuration

The script is called packaging/windows/setup_cross_compilation_env.sh. It contains the following variables that can be adjusted to fit your needs:

ARCHITECTURE=64

The architecture (64-bit vs 32-bit) that the binaries will be built for. The majority of users today run a 64-bit Windows, therefore 64 is the default. If you run a 32-bit version of Windows, change this to 32.

INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/mxe

Base installation directory

PARALLEL=

Number of processes to execute in parallel. Will be set to the number of cores available if left empty.

1.2.2. Execution

From the MKVToolNix source directory run:

./packaging/windows/setup_cross_compilation_env.sh

If everything works fine, you'll end up with a configured MKVToolNix source tree. You just have to run rake afterwards.

1.3. Manual installation

First you will need the MXE build scripts. Get them by downloading them (see section 1.1. above) and unpacking them into $HOME/mxe.

Next, build the required libraries (change MXE_TARGETS to i686-w64-mingw32.static if you need a 32-bit build instead of a 64-bit one, and increase JOBS if you have more than one core):

cd $HOME/mxe
make MXE_TARGETS=x86_64-w64-mingw32.static MXE_PLUGIN_DIRS=plugins/gcc9 \
  JOBS=2 \
  gettext libiconv zlib boost file flac lzo ogg pthreads vorbis cmark \
  libdvdread qtbase qttranslations

Append the installation directory to your PATH variable:

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/mxe/usr/bin
hash -r

Finally, configure MKVToolNix (the host=… spec must match the MXE_TARGETS spec from above):

cd $HOME/path/to/mkvtoolnix-source
host=x86_64-w64-mingw32.static
qtbin=$HOME/mxe/usr/${host}/qt5/bin
./configure \
  --host=${host} \
  --enable-static-qt \
  --with-moc=${qtbin}/moc --with-uic=${qtbin}/uic --with-rcc=${qtbin}/rcc \
  --with-boost=$HOME/mxe/usr/${host}

If everything works, build it:

rake

You're done.

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