Uncommon uses

The modular nature of vlc allows you to do quite strange and unusual things with it. This page tries to list some funny and insane uses

Caca and Goom

If you have vlc compiled with both caca and goom you can listen to music with caca rendering the output of goom. That means you can show the visualisations from an audio file as colour ASCII art! Try something like this:

vlc --audio-filter goom --vout caca somemusic.mp3

Encoding Lots of Files

This command shows how to encode a whole directory of files in Linux, without your input. When complete, it'll show a message to say it is complete. It's a single command split over several lines (with \)

for A in *.avi; do \
echo ************************* $A ********************* ;\
vlc --sout-all "$A" :sout="#transcode{...}:\
std{access=file,mux=avi,url=~/$A.avi}" \
vlc:quit -I dummy ;\
done ;\
Xdialog --title 'Complete' --msgbox 'All done' 0 0;

Make sure you really understand this command before using it. It's also a good idea to make sure you've got the right options in the transcode bit, and that it'll transcode the right files. The output is sent to your home folder in this example.