x264 and FFMPEG compilation for Windows

Compiling FFMPEG with x264 support on Windows requires additionnal steps. This article follows the previous article: How to compile FFMPEG for Windows 11, so make sure to follow the previous steps before continuing.

NASM vs YASM

I’m not totally sure why, but I haven’t been able to compile x264 with yasm, so I had to install nasm. However, when I tried to compile FFMPEG with nasm installed, the compilation hanged. So I had to uninstall nasm to get back to yasm.

The trick is: install nasm, compile x264, uninstall nasm.

Prerequisites

First, follow the steps in this article to make sure you can compile a basic version of FFMPEG: How to compile FFMPEG for Windows 11

All the following steps are executed In the MSYS2 console.

Compile x264

Install nasm

pacman -S nasm

Download and compile x264:

cd ~
git clone http://git.videolan.org/git/x264.git
cd x264
CC=cl ./configure --enable-static --prefix=./installed
make
make install

Uninstall nasm

pacman -R nasm

Compile FFMPEG

Next, you must download and compile FFMPEG. You must enable x264 and specify the path:

cd ~
git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg_x64
cd ffmpeg_x64
make clean

PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/home/<user>/x264/installed/lib/pkgconfig"

CC=cl ./configure --target-os=win64 --arch=x86_64 --toolchain=msvc --enable-shared --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --extra-ldflags="-LIBPATH:../x264/installed/lib/" --extra-cflags="-I../x264/installed/include/"

make
make install

The FFmpeg output will be located in C:\msys64\home\<user>\ffmpeg_x64

Notes:

If the compilation hangs on the following line:

Creating library libavcodec/avcodec.lib and object libavcodec/avcodec.exp

This means you faced the compilation problem with nasm. Make sure to uninstall nasm before compiling FFMPEG.