The VideoLAN Forums

I'm trying to create a web radio relay that will listen on port 80. What is the risk in running vlc as root? Is it absolutely necessary to have root privileges in order to listen on port 80? What is the safest possible way for me to do this? Right now I'm using 'sudo vlc-wrapper ...' Thanks in advance and sorry if this question has been asked before.

Ypu're not really running VLC as root. That's the whole point of the wrapper. The only thing it does as root is to opens port 80 , then it goes back to being a normal user

Thank you