The VideoLAN Forums

I'm now using windows 10 and vlc portable 3.0.3, I send a url to

localhost:8080/requests/status.xml?command=in_play&input=A%3a%2ffiles%2f396_%20Did%20Rising%20Rates.mp4

(this is a file with url encoding that decodes to A:/files/396_ Did Rising Rates.mp4)

and it does not work with a message saying: lua warning: Playlist item's path should be a string

This used to work in the past, with win7 and an older version of vlc.

Is there any documentation on what the format of this string should be? I tried looking up the lua source but the test is too complex, many nested macro definitions that I couldn't follow.

In VLC player click Media ---> Open Network Stream.

Copy/paste https://youtu.be/JrGqaeQDX7I and click "Play".

re: Hitchhker, yes, you found where I originally got the file, but my problem is that ANY file I happen to have won't play. I have a vlc remote app I wrote that can save the position and file name currently playing, and I want to restore to that file/time later. So, I am using the http interface. But it no longer works, though it worked fine for many years.

Here is a simpler url, with spaces around the : so the forum won't hide most of the text:

http : //localhost:8080/requests/status.xml?command=in_play&input=A%3a%2ffiles%2ftest.mp4

and in the messages window, I get:

lua warning: Playlist item's path should be a string

Note, this file is in my A: folder, a ramdisk. I can retreive the running file name and the time. I can issue play/pause, fullscreen etc using this lua interface. It's the play with an input that does not work any longer.

I finally discovered the problem here. When I request from VLC the current playing file which is on my a: drive, it returns a value with file:///a:/.... which uses all forward slashes. Because the file: part was relatively new (it wasn't there when I first wrote my program some 5-8 years ago, not sure) and was messing up my code which needs to test if the file still exists later, I would remove everything except the windows file name, a:/... and save that away. The forward slashes work equally well on windows, so that part worked.

Here's the rub, if you send a play request to VLC and don't use the file:///.... form, then you cannot use forward slashes. You must send to VLC using back slashes, i.e. a:\.... or VLC will silently ignore what you sent. It won't even make it into the playlist.

I'm not sure if my original problem has completely gone away, however, since I think that at sometime between my posts the lua behavior on a bad file specifier might have changed, as I no longer got that error message. It just ignored it.

Anyway, my code now replaces the 3 letter coding for a / with the value for a \ and it works again.