Re: [bongo-devel] Re: VLC problems on w32

[Daniel Brockman]

Dieter Deyke <address@hidden> writes:

> Daniel Brockman <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> We have already established that it does print to stdout.
>> However, maybe it doesn't read from stdin...  That explains
>> everything, I think.
>>
>> Good thought.  Now that you've suggested it, it seems quite
>> probable that this is in fact the problem.
>>
>> So maybe we'll have to use the socket interface on Windows.
>>
>>    vlc -I rc --rc-host localhost
>>
>> Unfortunately, if you run VLC like that, it does not print
>> the port that it binds to.  So we'll have to specify the
>> port explicitly, which is pretty damn lame.  So maybe we
>> should try one port, and if that fails, try the next, etc.
>>
>> What's more, all this could be a little slow, because we'll
>> have to start VLC, wait for a sign that it has started to
>> listen to the port, and then open a TCP connection.
>> Hopefully this won't be unacceptably slow, because if it is,
>> we might have to keep a single VLC process running, and that
>> will require non-trivial changes to Bongo (on the other hand,
>> that capability might be nice to have anyway).
>>
>> I'm surprised this stuff is so hard.  It's almost like
>> nobody has ever tried to use the remote control interface.
>
> I played a little with running VLC is a command window, and I have
> noticed that
>
> - it will output to stdout
>
> - it will read on stdin

Maybe it reads from the terminal window.  I'm not exactly
sure what the difference is on Windows, but on Unix you
could read either from stdin or from `/dev/tty'.  If you ran
the application interactively in a terminal window, it would
behave the same no matter which of those you chose.  But as
soon as you redirected standard input or ran the program
without a controlling terminal (like Bongo does), you would
see that the former would work while the latter would fail.

> - it will quit when I type quit

That's reassuring.

> but only if I first change directory to the VLC installation directory.
> If I run VLC from some other current directory I just get an error
> message.  Now I am not sure that all this is relevant here, but it is
> something we could try.

Interesting.  What error message do you get if you run VLC
from some other directory?

-- 
Daniel Brockman <address@hidden>