VLC Plugin

[stevennoyce]

Hello,

I love the idea of this project and thank you for your work so far. I wanted to add my thoughts that I think a VLC plugin would be a great way to get a bit of momentum behind this project. I am willing to help contribute, and although I have not yet looked at VLCs plugin architecture, I am happy to do so, especially if I could get any feedback or direction. Have any plans been developed yet for how such a plugin would interface between VLC and the filters?

Any information you could share to get me started would be much appreciated. I am happy to help with this project.

• Steven

[jtwalraven]

@stevennoyce I was thinking about starting a VLC plugin as well. Unfortunately, time constraints on other projects have limited the amount of work I could do. Here are some informative links to get you started though:

https://wiki.videolan.org/Hacker_Guide/How_To_Write_a_Module/
http://www.coderholic.com/extending-vlc-with-lua/
https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc/share/lua/README.txt

[jtwalraven]

Also, if you do end up creating a project I would love to help out. Though, as I mentioned, my ability to contribute may be limited.

[ocram]

@stevennoyce and @jtwalraven Thank you so much for your help!

So far, there haven't been any preparations or discussions with regard to a VLC plugin yet. So this would really be the very first step towards such a plugin. But it would be absolutely appreciated, of course.

I think that the focus of such a plugin should be the that media can be tagged with annotations and that contributions can then be sent to the service. The other part, media playback with filters applied, has lower priority right now, since we have pretty good VLC support with the exported filter files already.

Annotating media sources in VLC directly, however, is really something that would be a giant step forward for this project. Right now, this can only be done in the browser, which supports only a small subset of formats and sources, compared to VLC.

Communication with the web service could be done via an API over HTTP that accepts and returns JSON. So the first step exploring the capabilities of VLC's plugin architecture should probably be checking how a basic UI can be created and how communication can be done over HTTP. Anyway, I would definitely ensure that all the required API endpoints are available on the web service.

[jacob-willden]

I've been looking through the documentation for the proprietary service Enjoy Movies Your Way, and I found that they built a free VLC plugin that one can use to create their own filters for DVDs. It's older software, and Windows only, but perhaps it may be useful to someone.