MediaControlAPI

Description

The MediaControl API is the extended API to control VLC from external applications (extension of LibVLC). Its core part (playback control) has been taken from the OMG Audio/Video Stream specification, and extended with additional functionalities.

The API is defined in "include/vlc/control.h" and implemented in "src/control".

The Doxygen documentation can be found at [1].

Current status

The API currently includes functions for the following things:

• Playback
  • Basic features (play/pause/stop)
  • Seeking
  • Basic playlist interaction
  • Stream information
• Audio/Video
  • Snapshot control
  • OSD display
  • Volume setting

Current uses

The MediaControl API is used by the following modules :

• the python binding
• the CORBA interface module

Foreseen evolutions

The following evolutions should be integrated in the API, but discussion is necessary to ensure that they are sufficiently flexible to match various needs :

• sound_[sg]et_volume: normalize volume in [0..100]
• implement set_visual() (for embedding the vout) -- for the moment, you can use the vlc.Object layer of the python module to define the "drawable" parameter.
• implement get_aspect_ratio (or get_dimensions ?)
• implement get_api_version() or get_capabilities() (which would return the list of capabilities supported by the player: ("core", "svg", "snapshot", etc)
• implement get/set_rate()
• Complete the implementation. For instance, the frame-by-frame unit (mediacontrol_SampleCount) is not implemented, and the stop/pause do not take the Position parameter into account (they are applied immediately).

Todo

• General cleanup of the functions to adapt to VLC coding style
• Write Doxygen documentation
• Add VLM control
• Bind the new API to Java and .NET