The VideoLAN Forums

Hi all,

First of all, I apologize in advance if this is somehow a dumb question. I've done a bit of searching around these forums, and haven't been able to find a pre-existing answer, but if I missed something please direct me to it.

Essentially, I have a two-parter question:
1. Is it possible to make VLC display a customizable set of metadata at the beginning of a video, instead of the filename? I currently use VLC for watching music videos, and I would love to be able have it display pieces of file metadata (think artist, title, album on separate lines) for a period of time when a video starts.
2. If the answer to the above is 'yes', is it possible to do this via commandline for a portable (Windows) installation? I like to keep all of my videos & VLC on an external drive, so that I can easily go back and forth between multiple computers in my house that are hooked up to TVs, and then run a batch file that automatically shuffles & starts playing my videos. But in case whatever settings happen to get changed between uses, I'm hoping that the metadata stuff can be configured programmatically by the batch script.

Thanks, all!

Regarding the first part of your question, although some other users have had problems (https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... ta#p411553),
I was successfully able to change text metadata by going to Tools / Media Information, saving changes, and exiting VLC.

I did not attempt anything more involved than simply making changes to the title and artist fields. My changes were displayed when I re-opened the video.

This may, at the very least, be a start.

Regarding the first part of your question, although some other users have had problems (https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... ta#p411553),
I was successfully able to change text metadata by going to Tools / Media Information, saving changes, and exiting VLC.

I did not attempt anything more involved than simply making changes to the title and artist fields. My changes were displayed when I re-opened the video.

This may, at the very least, be a start.

Thanks for the reply!

Okay, I feel REALLY stupid now. Because my video files had the naming scheme "<title> - <artist>", what was displaying was actually the metadata. I just thought it was the filename, sans the extension, because they were the same thing!

So, at this point, I guess I can update my original question a bit. Now that I know it DOES display metadata, is there a way to control what metadata is displayed? Right now, it seems to only want to show title and artist.

Tools > Preferences > Show settings = All > Input/Codecs: Change title according to current media [$Z]

Tools > Preferences > Show settings = All > Input/Codecs: Change title according to current media [$Z]

Yeah, I found that poking around in the settings, as well as the list of other usable variables in the wiki. It seems that changing this quite literally only changes the title of the active VLC window, but doesn't actually affect the text that is displayed at the start of a video.

So self update here:

After additional scouring of the wiki, I eventually came across some pages that seem to suggest that the marq module is what I want. As per one of the examples here, I launched VLC via the command prompt with the following option, and the word "test" is successfully displayed over the video.
The problem, though, is that I can't actually seem to get it to display any of the metadata values. If I replace the above option as per another of the examples on the page I linked above, like this...
...it literally displays the raw text "$t" over the video. The same holds true for all the other variables listed on this page. Can anyone shed some light on why that is? I'm fairly certain I'm using the command properly. For reference, here is the complete command I'm attempting to use in the command prompt.

Meta-data expansions ($) are not available for marquee sub filter anymore (they work in VLC-2.0.x). You can use only time expansions (%).

Ugh. Okay, well, I guess I'm really back to square one on this thread, then. If those expansions are not available, is there any way to do what I'm talking about?

Do you want to see your filename over playing video instead of metadata title? I think you could have a simple VLC Extension manually activated in VLC menu.
Otherwise the related topic: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=120417

What I was really hoping for was the ability to display a specific combination of metadata, with line breaks, instead of the standard metadata title. I have a large assortment of music videos, which I use VLC to randomly play through. I would like the ability to have the artist, song title, and album (from the metadata) displayed briefly on separate lines whenever a video starts. Basically, the same way this sort of information is shown on music networks like MTV.

Metadata extensions seemed like the most obvious way to do this, so I suppose maybe just downgrading to a previous version is the most effective way to go about this. Theoretically, I suppose I could also create custom subtitle files for each and every video, containing the appropriate information and placed at the right position. That seems like quite an ordeal, though, relative to just using metadata.

Is the removal of the expansions a permanent change? Or is there any discussion of them returning in a future version?

I can help you with this VLC Extension Lua script: Metadata over video
Just save the script in a "vlc\lua\extensions\mov.lua" file. Then start it in vlc menu: View > Metadata over video
Find some other extensions at http://addons.videolan.org/index.php?xcontentmode=903

You can always try previous VLC versions: http://download.videolan.org/vlc/
Custom subtitle files with metada is a working solution, too. VLC Lua scripting can help you to generate them.

I think there is a ticket somewhere at https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/
Metada expansions in Marquee sub filter would be displayed in a playing video all the time and not just for a while.

Awesome, mederi! Much appreciated! Behaviorally, this does precisely what I wanted.

I guess I never realized precisely what all Lua scripting could accomplish. Seems like it can do quite a bit of cool stuff.

There is currently no way to have the extension start automatically, though, correct? Some quick googling suggests turns up a Stack Exchange answer saying it can't be done, and I don't see any command line parameters to do it.