The VideoLAN Forums

I can't seem to be able to figure out how to get VLC on OSX to use stdin from CLI ... I've tried using all three of: - and /dev/stdin and stream:///dev/stdin

Any suggestions? Is this possible?

bump! No body has an answer to this question? I also asked it about 3 years ago and got no answer then ...

The use of stdin is an incredibly useful thing for me and am hoping that I'm just missing something and that it indeed works on OSX.

Bump one more time ..

Does _anybody_ know if it's possible to use stdin on OSX? If so how can it be done?

I have no idea whether this is possible, but what are you trying to achieve?

I have no idea whether this is possible, but what are you trying to achieve?

I'm trying to pipe in video that I'm capturing with another command line app (from set top box via firewire) and transcode in realtime to x264 or mp4v and then either have it streamed via udp or saved to a local file. Using this sort of approach works fine on the linux version of VLC but I can't seem to get stdin working at all on OSX.

What is the other application?

One app I'd like to do this with is a modified version of clover (which is a python wrapped version of the firewire grab examples apple provides in their firewire SDK). I've also got another variation based on apple examples I've been working on that just grabs raw dv streams from firewire.

clover: http://www.remix.net/static/clover/

If you feel comfortable with the source it may be worth building and trying to investigate what is happening. The answer I got on the developer mailing list was not very useful.

I know this is not the most useful answer, but I don't have anything else to offer you at this point

If I dig around long enough I might be able to grok enough to see if it's disabled or something I suppose ... but that's about it. Never enough hours in the day!

Was hoping one of the OSX devs knew the answer to this one already

I also need to play stdin on Mac OS X. Is it possible? I tried "cat foo.avi | vlc -" but it just opens up the UI and plays nothing. I found that many of the command line options did not work, eg -f for fullscreen. "vlc -f foo.avi" opens the UI and plays nothing. Omitting the -f does play foo.avi in a window. Some of them did work though, eg "vlc -I rc" brought up the remote control prompt. I am running VLC 1.1.3 on OSX 10.6.4. I am running it from a Terminal command line with alias vlc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC'