vlc-control

Remote control of VLC, from another computer, which can handle DVD navigation via cursor-keys and Enter, plus a few more things.

The bits missing from the web UI!

Setup

This script is written to Python 3.2 and uses curses. It expects a UTF-8 locale for some of the characters printed.

It has been tested on MacOS. OS success/failure reports welcome.

Turn on the "RC" interface (also called "OLDRC") in VLC. Set an IP address and port to listen on in VLC's preferences.
Eg, to listen on port 4321 for any IPv6 address, enter: [::]:4321
By code inspection, I see that vlc now parses this input as a URL. So enter: tcp://:4321/

Invoke this script with: vlc-control -s my-vlc-server.hostname.example.org:4321

Examples

VLC: Persistent configuration

Launch VLC, open Preferences (⌘-, on macOS), click "Show All"; on the left, expand "Interfaces", "Main Interfaces", enable the "Remote control interface" checkbox (which will add oldrc to the viewable list of interfaces just above the checkboxes). Then on the left, click "RC" and in the new control tab, for "TCP command input", enter the URL for listening.

Enter tcp://127.0.0.1:4321/ to listen on all IPs on the localhost, which is safest but does raise the question of "why", with other controls available.

Enter tcp://:4321/ to listen on all IPs on port 4321, which will allow anyone who can reach you over the network to control VLC without authentication. Possibly useful on trusted networks to control a mini playing onto a nice screen, or when another laptop is hooked up to a TV.

Then use vlc-control.py -s 127.0.0.1:4321, for remote hosts replacing the loopback IP with whatever hostname is needed to reach the running instance of VLC.

VLC: Non-persistent, CLI enabling

The above shows us that oldrc is an "extra interface", not an "interface", so we want the --extraintf parameter, not -I. Using vlc -p oldrc --advanced we can see the available options. Thus:

$ vlc --extraintf=oldrc --rc-host tcp://127.0.0.1:4321/ "$filename"

Limitations

No file-selection or browsing UI: I still use the web UI for that. Patches welcome.

Shift-<digit> assumes US keyboard layout.

Problems

I am experimenting with use of gerrithub.io for pull requests and reviews in this repository:

• https://review.gerrithub.io/#/q/project:philpennock/vlc-control,n,z
• Clone, anonymous HTTP: https://review.gerrithub.io/philpennock/vlc-control
• SSH Push URL: ssh://review.gerrithub.io:29418/philpennock/vlc-control (requires account)

I accept pull requests and issue reports via the github interfaces for such.

https://github.com/philpennock/vlc-control/