.. title: VLC Renderer for Miro on gtk-x11
.. slug: vlc_renderer
.. date: 2009-07-16 17:24:28
.. tags: miro, work, python

<p>
  I threw together a VLC renderer for Miro on gtk-x11 based on the VLC renderer
  code we use for Miro on Windows.  It took an hour or so to get it working.
</p>
<p>
  I'd love to toss it in into Miro, but it's got one major problem and one
  minor one.
</p>
<p>
  The major problem is that VLC handles mouse events rather than letting them
  bubble up to Miro.  When you double-click on the a video, VLC handles the
  double-click and switches the video to fullscreen (or out of fullscreen).
  It'd be better if Miro handled this--then it could show the media item
  details bar.  Also, VLC handles mouse movement.  Miro needs to handle this, too,
  so then it can show the item details bar.
</p>
<p>
  The minor problem is that VLC doesn't have <code>libvlc_video_track_count</code>
  in versions prior to 1.0.  I'm not sure how else to figure out if a media file
  has video tracks in it.  Because of this, the sniffer code is pretty ham-fisted
  if you have earlier versions of VLC.
</p>
<p>
  The code is at <a href="http://bluesock.org/~willkg/download/vlcrenderer.py">http://bluesock.org/~willg/download/vlcrenderer.py</a> 
  if you're interested in fiddling with it.  There's documentation at the top of
  the file that walks through installing and using it.
</p>
<p>
  I'd love to get some help fixing it.  Adding support for VLC and dropping support
  for xine on gtk-x11 would make things a lot easier for us Miro devs.
</p>