The following outlines the compilation of ffmpeg DLL's and executables using the Microsoft Visual Studio compiler.

1. Download Microsoft Visual Studio (Community edition) from Microsft Website and install it.

2. Download MSYS2 x68_64 from link and install it into C:\ folder

3. Install build tools in msys64

       cd C:\msys64
       Execute msys2_shell.cmd

   Execute in the msys2 shell

       pacman -S make gcc diffutils

   Close the shell. To avoid a name conflict rename C:\msys64\usr\bin\link.exe into C:/msys64/usr/bin/link_old.exe. This ensures that your compile environment will use the linker from the Microsoft Visual Studio.

4. Install YASM

   Download Win64.exe from link and rename the downloaded executable to yasm.exe. Create the folder C:\yasm and place the renamed file into this latter. Add this folder to your path.

5. Setup the environment variables for the 64 bit build

   Run the following batch script in the windows command line tool:

       cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC
       vcvarsall.bat x64

   The flag x64 sets the environment up for compilation of 64 bit versions.

6. Switch to the MSYS shell

   In the windows command line from the prior step navigate to C:\msys64. Run the command: msys2_shell.cmd -msys -use-full-path This ensures that the environment variables PATH and LIB carry over into the msys shell. This opens a new msys shell in a separate window.

7. In the msys shell CHECK the compiler and linker:

       $ which cl
       /c/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0/VC/BIN/amd64/cl
       $ which link
       /c/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0/VC/BIN/amd64/link

   This ensures that your MVS compiler and linker are used.

8. Download FFmpeg source code

   Download the ZIP file of the latest FFmpeg source code from the Github Repository and unzip the file into the folder FFmpeg-release-x.x.x.

9. Configure for compilation of 64 bit DLLs In the msys shell:

      cd /c/PATH/TO/FFMPEG_SOURCE/

   Run the following command to configure the build for FFmpeg:

   ./configure --toolchain=msvc 
                  --enable-swscale 
                  --enable-asm 
                  --enable-yasm 
                  --target-os=win64 
                  --arch=x86_64 
                  --enable-shared 
                  --disable-static 
                  --disable-ffserver 
                  --disable-avdevice 
                  --disable-doc 
                  --disable-ffplay 
                  --disable-ffprobe 
                  --disable-ffmpeg 
                  --enable-w32threads    

10. A successful configuration ends with the lines

        License: LGPL version 2.1 or later
        Creating config.mak, config.h, and doc/config.texi...
        config.asm is unchanged
        libavutil/avconfig.h is unchanged
        WARNING: pkg-config not found, library detection may fail.
        libavcodec/bsf_list.c is unchanged
        libavformat/protocol_list.c is unchanged

    You can ignore the pkg-config not found issue. It will not affect compilation.

11. Compile the source code to produce DLLs

        make -j4

    The -j4 flag indicates to use 4 threads for compilation. This speeds up the compilation process. You may want to set the number of threads even higher depending on your hardware.

12. The successful compilation ends with.

        LD      libavdevice/avdevice-57.dll
           Creating library libavdevice/avdevice.lib and object libavdevice/avdevice.exp
        LD      ffmpeg_g.exe
        LD      ffprobe_g.exe
        CP      ffprobe.exe
        STRIP   ffprobe.exe
        skipping strip ffprobe.exe
        CP      ffmpeg.exe
        STRIP   ffmpeg.exe
        skipping strip ffmpeg.exe

Useful installation guides:

• https://pracucci.com/compile-ffmpeg-on-windows-with-visual-studio-compiler.html
• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/MSVC
• http://ffmpeg.org/platform.html