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. An IDL specification MediaControl.idl has been the base of this work.

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 (requires the use of the snapshot vout module via the clone video filter; invoke with: vlc --video-filter clone --clone-vout-list default,snapshot )
  • OSD display (of text and SVG graphics through the svg rendering module)
  • Volume setting
  • Setting the visual ID of an embedding window

Current uses

The MediaControl API is used by the following modules :

• the python binding (see [2] for a basic code sample)
• 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 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).
• Fix VLC initialization on Win32 so that it uses the registry key to find the default plugins directory by default. Currently, it uses the vlc.exe path, which it cannot find when using VLC embedded. A workaround is to chdir to the vlc.exe directory before instanciating the MediaControl() object.

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