Apache VOD setup - no browser plugins

[charles]

I'm trying to use MythTV + some php hacks to view recorded videos on a Windows system with VLC installed. I need to pass an MRL locator file to the browser, because if I try to use the link to the MPEG file, it will try to download a multi-gigabyte file! Is this possible? I tried to install perl on the windows box to use a perl script to parse a locator file. It works fine from DOS command line, but mozilla won't execute perl scripts for this sort of thing. Any advice appreciated.

[BigBen]

The "hack" I used to achive that was, not to give the link to the file directly in the page, but a link to a playlist file (a text file where you only put the complete address of the file you want to see). Then, the browser downloads the file. If it is assossiated with vlc, it will open this file with VLC, which will play the file from the apache server.

Alternatively, you could have a look at the mozilla plugin...

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. However, I am not able to achieve this. How do you tell vlc that it will be loading a playlist and not a file to play. I can't find an option to tell vlc to load up and play items from a playlist unless I do it from within the GUI. I have to test with Linux for now, since the Windows machine is at home and I'm at work, but the arguments to vlc viewer appear to be the same on both platforms.

[charles]

Sorry for the "guest" post. That was me.

[Sigmund]

Just put the mrl on a single line in a text file and call it .m3u and associate vlc with m3u files. If this is not an option (because you want m3u files to be associated with something else) then put the mrl in a .pls or a .asx or a .b4s and give the file an extention that is unused by any other program and associate vlc with that extention. Vlc should be able to detect these playlist file types based on the content, so renaming them should not cause a problem