Building Documentation

Building Documentation

To build FFmpeg's documentation, you need texi2html. If the configure script finds it, documentation will be automatically generated, or else, no documentation will be generated.

FFmpeg's website uses an old (hard to find) version of texi2html (version 1.56k), which produces a very nice output. The newest version of texi2html produces something else, which I dislike.

You can either install the latest and ugly version, or the old and nice version.

texi2html requires perl, which can be installed with the MSys DTK.

texi2html version 1.56k
texi2html latest version

pod2man is also needed, to generate man pages, or else make will fail. I don't build them. I don't want man pages.

I simply create an empty /bin/pod2man file:

touch /bin/pod2man

texi2html version 1.56k

It's rather hard to find this old version of texi2html, but it produces better output.
I'm hosting a copy at: http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_sources/texi2html

As is, FFmpeg's configure script won't find it, since it returns -1 on texi2html -version, while it should return 0.
So, either get the original file http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_sources/texi2html.orig
and apply this patch: http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_sources/texi2html.patch
or, better yet, install the patched version: http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_sources/texi2html.patched

To install it, simply download that file to your /bin folder.
In Windows, it should be C:/msys/bin.
Remember to remove the .patched or .orig extension.