Live555: Compiling with VS2008

Compiling Live555 Streaming Media with Visual Studio 2008 isn’t obvious. Using Cygwin or MinGW is just a pain and frankly unnecessary. There is no built-in support for VS solution files, because Windows support is a low priority for the Live555 community. This is evidenced by this forum response from Ross Finlayson:

>4. Is it possible to include a Visual Studio solution in the
>distrubution to make it more convenient for Windows developers to
>use live555?
>5. Is it possible for live555 to generate adequate makefiles for
>Windows systems with development environments newer than Visual
>Studio 2003?

I have no current plans to change this. (These days, fewer and fewer people seem to be using Windows for development of system software.)

Regardless, Live555 works fine on Windows and is actually quite easy to build. Simply do the following:

1. Open the ‘win32config’ file and change the TOOLS32=... variable to your VS2008 install directory. For me, it’s TOOLS32=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC
2. In ‘win32config’, modify the LINK_OPTS_0=... line from msvcirt.lib to msvcrt.lib. This fixes the link error:
   LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'msvcirt.lib'
3. Open the Visual Studio command prompt.
4. From the ‘live’ source directory, run genWindowsMakefiles
5. Now you’re ready to build. Simply run the following commands:

   cd liveMedia
   nmake /B -f liveMedia.mak
   cd ..\groupsock
   nmake /B -f groupsock.mak
   cd ..\UsageEnvironment
   nmake /B -f UsageEnvironment.mak
   cd ..\BasicUsageEnvironment
   nmake /B -f BasicUsageEnvironment.mak
   cd ..\testProgs
   nmake /B -f testProgs.mak
   cd ..\mediaServer
   nmake /B -f mediaServer.mak

That’s it. You should be good to go.