Today I'm trying to setup CygWin to build VLC from the source. Again, the experience is not as good as I expected. But here, I'm spending most of my time downloading and installing necessary development packages. At first, I had troubles in picking up a download site. I was unlucky on the first two attempts; one was extremely slow, the other dropped the connection on me after I've spent half hour selecting packages!

Finally I've successfully built VLC on WinXP! This whole build process is not as easy as I expected. So now I'm documenting the whole process here in case I forget it in the future.

In the last few days I've been researching a cross-platform DVD player alternative to replace my own YZDVD, which is Win32 only. Between Mplayer and VLC, I choose VLC to play with because I like its modular extensible architecture.

Now, why do I pick MingW over CygWin? Because I hate to make too many choices in a short period of time:-) CygWin is huge with so many packages! No, this is not a rational reason, in fact, I will be trying CygWin pretty soon.