VideoLAN DMO module build - Linux WMV3

Presentation

The DMO (Direct Media Object) module allows VLC to read some proprietary video codecs using Windows DLL.

This is necessary because these codecs are proprietary, and there can be no free implementation for them.
Using Windows DLL is a bad solution : no code control, only works on i386, ... Unfortunately, it is the only available solution for free media players to read these formats.

The most important of these codecs is Windows Media Video 3 (WMV3).
A large number of videos use this codec.

The DMO plugin can also load these DLL under Linux, using Mplayer's DLL loader.

This capability is not enabled in official VLC builds.
Using these modules, you can add DMO capability to your VLC under Linux.

Installation instructions

The downloaded file must be copied to your VLC plugins folder, which is usually /usr/lib/vlc/ if you installed a package from your distribution, and /usr/local/lib/vlc if you compiled VLC by yourself.

The module must match your VLC version, or it won't be loaded.
To find out your version, just look at the About dialog.

You also need a win32 codecs package.
You can use Mplayer's one.

Download

• Plugin for VLC 0.8.2
• Plugin for VLC 0.8.3-svn Warning: this module might stop working as 0.8.3-svn evolves

Do it yourself

This section is only useful if you want to compile these modules yourself, rather than using the prebuild modules.

First method

To compile these modules yourself, you need :

• To compile VLC by yourself. You'll find some detailed information to do that on VLC Developers page
• To build Mplayer

Instructions:

• Copy all the ".o" in mplayer's loader directory to the modules/codec/dmo folder of VLC
• Create a wine folder in modules/codec/dmo.
• Copy windef.h and winerror.h from Mplayer's loader/wine to the new wine folder
• Copy the ldt_keeper.h file from loader
• Copy the cpudetect.o file from mplayer's root folder.
• Apply patch to dmo.c
• You are now ready to compile : make libdmo_plugin.so LDFLAGS="module.o ldt_keeper.o win32.o pe_image.o registry.o ext.o resource.o pe_resource.o stubs.o wrapper.o cpudetect.o"
• You should now have a libdmo_plugin.so file and VLC should now be able to read WMV3 video

Second method (recommended)

Remi Denis-Courmont made a build script to ease the build of these modules

Download the build script

Instructions are available in the tarball