Hacker Guide

Introduction

VLC media player is a large and complex piece of software. It also uses a large number of dependencies.

Being open source allows VLC development to benefit from a large community of developers worldwide.

However, entering a project such as VLC media player can be long and complex for new developers.

This guide seeks to help understanding the VLC code base and VLC internals to quickly get up to speed.

It will tell you what you need to know about VLC media player.

NB: this guide is not about compiling VLC.

The layers of VLC and libVLC

VLC's Core /libvlccore

• Core
• VLM Internals
• Input

Plugins / Modules

• Interfaces
• Access

• Demux
• Decoder
• Audio Filters
• Video Filters

• Audio Mixers
• Audio Output
• Video Output

Modules not documented (yet)

• Stream Filters
• Visualization
• Encoder
• Mux
• Packetizers
• Stream Output
• Access Output

libVLC and bindings

• Using libvlc
• bindings

VLC source code overview

• VLC source tree
• VLC modules (also see Modules source tree )
• VLC Object Management
• VLC Preferences
• VLC Playlist and Media Library
• VLC variables
• Doxygen Documentation

Coding for VLC

• Sending Patches
• Code Conventions
• Adding a module

Authors

• Derk-Jan Hartman
• Christophe Massiot
• Samuel Hocevar
• Geoffroy Couprie
• Jean-Baptiste Kempf

This page is part of official VLC media player Documentation (User Guide • Streaming HowTo • Hacker Guide • Modules)
Please read the Documentation Editing Guidelines before you edit the documentation

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.