Writing a table generator This documentation is preliminary. Parts of the API are not good and should be changed. Basic concepts A table generator consists of two files, *_tablegen.c and *_tablegen.h. The .h file will provide the variable declarations and initialization code for the tables, the .c describes the tables so they can be printed as a header file. Both of these files will be compiled for the host system, so to avoid breakage with cross-compilation neither of them may include, directly or indirectly, config.h or avconfig.h. Due to this, the .c file or Makefile may have to provide additional defines or stubs, though if possible this should be avoided. The .c file This file should include the *_tablegen.h and tableprint.h files and anything else it needs as long as it does not depend on config.h or avconfig.h. In addition to that it must contain a void tableinit(void) function which initializes all tables by calling the init functions from the .h file. It must also contain a "const struct tabledef tables[]" array describing the tables to be generated. Its entries consist of (in order): - a string suitable for declaring the table, up to but not including the = NULL terminates the table - a function to print the table - tableprint.h defines some defaults, e.g. write_uint8_array to print a uint8_t array. - a pointer to the table - the size of the first dimension of the array - if applicable, the size of the second dimension of the array The .h file This file should contain: - one or more initialization functions - the table variable declarations If CONFIG_HARDCODED_TABLES is set, the initialization functions should not do anything, and instead of the variable declarations the generated *_tables.h file should be included. Since that will be generated in the build directory, the path must be included, i.e. #include "libavcodec/example_tables.h" not #include "example_tables.h" Makefile changes To make the automatic table creation work, you must manually declare the new dependency. For this add a line similar to this: $(SUBDIR)example.o: $(SUBDIR)example_tables.h under the "ifdef CONFIG_HARDCODED_TABLES" section in the Makefile.