Open Source Days 2023

xSTUDIO is an Open Source review and playback application intended for the VFX, Animation and beyond. From the project’s inception it was intended that xSTUDIO would be cross-platform with binary distributions for MacOS, Windows and Linux. Naturally this aspect would be crucial to the success of xSTUDIO as an Open Source product. However, the initial phase of development was done exclusively on Linux. For the DNEG xSTUDIO team the cross-platform requirement remained something of low priority. Following the Open Source release of xSTUDIO dev teams from Epic Games and Ahead partnered to investigate xSTUDIO as a candidate for deployment as a playback and review solution. As a predominantly Windows platform business the next steps for Epic would require a full Windows port for xSTUDIO. The team carried out this work with (more moral than technical) support from the DNEG xSTUDIO team. In this talk we will hear about this experience of adapting the codebase and dependencies to be Windows compliant. Cross platform support is an important goal for many Open Source software products. Sharing our experience of porting a GUI application from a Linux environment to Windows, the short cuts that were learned and the build tools that enabled and accelerated this effort.