The VideoLAN Forums

Hi guys,

I've been trying to do something with VLC and just couldn't make it work.

My situation is like this; I have a Fedora 6 PC that starts up in the morning and shutdown unattended in the evening everyday (Used for displaying educational info during daytime).

My question is how do I configure the VLC to automatically runs a video right after a boot-up?

It says error 'cannot open display' and few more display error lines. VLC only runs correctly if I've logged into KDE/Gnome desktop.

Can anyone help me out? Thanks.

Start an X server on a known display number (default is :0), then start VLC with:

DISPLAY=:0 vlc /path/to/file


And you'll want to do this in rc.local. May want to start VLC with the -I dummy options to keep the player control interface from showing.

Thanks sjensen, that worked perfectly.

For those who are looking for the answer, this how I had it done:

$ export DISPLAY=:0.0
$ vlc -I dummy [the rest of the options]

Also, I configured the KDE/Gnome to auto login to non-root user so that I don't need to manually login first everyday.