There are different makefiles that can be used to build GStreamer with the usual Microsoft compiling tools. The Makefile is meant to be used with the GNU make program and the free version of the Microsoft compiler (http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/). You also have to modify your system environment variables to use it from the command-line. You will also need a working Platform SDK for Windows that is available for free from Microsoft. The projects/makefiles will generate automatically some source files needed to compile GStreamer. That requires that you have installed on your system some GNU tools and that they are available in your system PATH. The GStreamer project depends on other libraries, namely : GLib popt libxml2 libintl libiconv There is now an existing package that has all these dependencies built with MSVC7.1. It exists either as precompiled librairies and headers in both Release and Debug mode, or as the source package to build it yourself. You can find it on http://mukoli.free.fr/gstreamer/deps/. GNU tools needed that you can find on http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ GNU flex (tested with 2.5.4) GNU bison (tested with 1.35) and http://www.mingw.org/ GNU make (tested with 3.80) the generated files from the -auto makefiles will be available soon separately on the net for convenience (people who don't want to install GNU tools). By default, GSTreamer needs a registry. You have to generate it using "gst-register.exe". It will create the file in c:\gstreamer\registry.xml that will hold all the plugins you can use. You should install the GSTreamer core in c:\gstreamer\bin and the plugins in c:\gstreamer\plugins. Both directories should be added to your system PATH. The library dependencies should be installed in c:\usr For example, my current setup is : c:\gstreamer\registry.xml c:\gstreamer\bin\gst-inspect.exe c:\gstreamer\bin\gst-launch.exe c:\gstreamer\bin\gst-register.exe c:\gstreamer\bin\gstbytestream.dll c:\gstreamer\bin\gstelements.dll c:\gstreamer\bin\gstoptimalscheduler.dll c:\gstreamer\bin\gstspider.dll c:\gstreamer\bin\libgtreamer-0.8.dll c:\gstreamer\plugins\gst-libs.dll c:\gstreamer\plugins\gstmatroska.dll c:\usr\bin\iconv.dll c:\usr\bin\intl.dll c:\usr\bin\libglib-2.0-0.dll c:\usr\bin\libgmodule-2.0-0.dll c:\usr\bin\libgobject-2.0-0.dll c:\usr\bin\libgthread-2.0-0.dll c:\usr\bin\libxml2.dll c:\usr\bin\popt.dll