I have been pulling my hair out trying to get mingw and opencv working on Windows for Visual Studio Code for the past three days.

I am using mingw 8.1, and opencv 4.5.2(tried 4.1.1) The online guides I found apparently don't work, and I even went as far as to build openCV myself to see if it would work, but it did not.

Every version I try throws a procedure entry point could not be located in dynamic link library imgcodecs452.dll error, and I could not find anything online. Has anyone ran into this issue?

Note that I'm running a very old CPU, pre-AVX x5690, but I did compile for without AVX yet it still failed.