NOTE: A version of this plugin was merged into VLC itself in 2015. This repo is now deprecated. Thanks for having a look! The original README follows below.

A VLC plugin that reads subtitles aloud using Microsoft SAPI on Windows.

This repo is very much in its initial stages. I am also new to VLC plugin development, and it probably shows.

Luckily, between the existing VLC speech synthesis plugin for OS X, and various other plugins that provided solid examples for the use of COM from within VLC's heavily multithreaded guts (which could have been a nightmare otherwise), I managed to put together something that actually works.

Put the .dll in VLC's plugins/text_renderer directory. Use VLC's configuration dialogs or command line to activate the plugin by name (sapispeechsynthesizer), load a video that has a subtitle track and it will (hopefully) start talking.

Honestly, I barely got this thing to build myself. Other than give some disorganized pointers, the most I can do is point you to the VLC wiki pages about writing modules and compiling out-of-tree modules. I will gladly accept PRs to sort out the build process and/or improve the following ad-hoc documentation.

So, some pointers that worked for me (but YMMV):

• Building with MinGW on Windows works. I downloaded a 32-bit toolchain from MinGW-w64.
• The Makefile depends on pkg-config. I downloaded pkg-config-lite and extracted pkg-config.exe to somewhere in the PATH.
• PKG_CONFIG_PATH should point to VLC's sdk/lib/pkgconfig directory. On my machine I had to copy the entire SDK directory elsewhere, because the special characters in C:\Program Files (x86) threw some of the tools off.
• The VLC SDK directory doesn't contain all the required headers, apparently. I had to copy some files from the equivalent VLC source version.
• MinGW's linker did not like the libvlccore.lib that came with VLC. I copied the actual libvlccore.dll to my modified SDK directory and that worked OK.