That's a half the time it took me. I had to apply patches from news groups and take MingW headers from CVS (because the official release broke the build).

On the other hand, once I compiled the libraries, I had no issues interfacing it with code in Visual C++ \C#. The source files are fairly clean and documented enough that I could mostly figure out what to do by looking at the code.

Yeah I went down this route and lost a lot of time also. I ended up cross compiling it for windows on ubuntu and it has worked out well enough but even that took nearly 2 days to track down how to do it and then add the filters and plugins I needed (for doing things I took for granted as being easy like video rotations, overlays, etc).