VLC Renderer for Miro on gtk-x11

Thursday July 16, 2009, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

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.

I'd love to toss it in into Miro, but it's got one major problem and one minor one.

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.

The minor problem is that VLC doesn't have libvlc_video_track_count 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.

The code is at https://bluesock.org/~willkg/download/vlcrenderer.py if you're interested in fiddling with it. There's documentation at the top of the file that walks through installing and using it.

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.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.