Hacker Guide/Core

Introduction

The core of VLC media player is the LibVLC, which provides an interface for applications to handle features such as playlist management, audio and video decoding and output, a thread system. All the LibVLC source files are located in the src/ directory and its subdirectories:

• config/: load the configuration from command line and configuration file, provides functions for the modules to read and write to configuration
• control/: functions to control the behaviour of LibVLC, like Play/Pause, volume management, fullscreen, log verbosity, etc.
• extras/: mostly platform-specific code
• modules/: module management
• network/: network interface (socket management, network errors, etc.)
• osd/: On Screen Display manipulation
• test/: LibVLC needs to be tested, and not only by users :)
• text/: charset stuff
• interface/: contains code for user interaction such as key presses and device ejection.
• playlist/: manages playlist interaction such as stop, play, next, or random playback.
• input/: opens an input module, reads packets, parses them and passes reconstituted elementary streams to the decoder(s).
• video_output/: initializes the video display, gets all pictures and subpictures (ie. subtitles) from the decoder(s), optionally converts them to another format (such as YUV to RGB), and displays them.
• audio_output/: initializes the audio mixer, ie. finds the right playing frequency, and then resamples audio frames received from the decoder(s).
• stream_output/: functions to stream audio and video to the network
• misc/: miscellaneous utilities used in other parts of libvlc, such as the thread system, the message queue, CPU detection, the object lookup system, or platform-specific code.