[Libav-user] installing for Windows

["René J.V. Bertin"]

On Nov 26, 2012, at 14:00, Carl Eugen Hoyos wrote:

> René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at ...> writes:
> 
>> I've noticed that the win32 and win64 static ffmpeg version
>> are way less verbose than their *n*x counterparts.
> 
> (Command line and complete, uncut console output missing.)
> Could you elaborate? This seems unlikely.
> 

OK, I'm confused, I cannot reproduce it anymore. However, launching ffmpeg via popen( "ffmpeg ...", "wb" ) indeed doesn't show any output on the cmd window that's opened. 

>> An ffmpeg that doesn't use the Console subsystem shouldn't do this, right?
> 
> ffmpeg can only be used from the command line...

Erm, I beg to differ. That may be the most usual way to launch ffmpeg, but just how many applications are there that launch ffmpeg without asking the user to type things onto a command line? On MS Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, GUI applications receive their arguments (files dragged onto their icon) via argc/argv (or can at least obtain them in a comparable manner). Called that way, they run in a limited version of sh or similar, with standard input and outputs connected wherever the system decides.
I have a very basic GUI movie player without a menu or anything, and it receives its arguments exactly that way. If it calls functions in one of my DLLs that contain fprintf(stderr) statements, their output just disappears (on MSWin), rather than causing a CMD window to be opened.

R.