Error handling from API calls?!?

[dl0haus]

I've been messing with the API a bit and needed some info on error handling. If I feed VLC a bad address to an MMS server, it appears to do *nothing* in return. This seems to happen in the VLC interface too; it doesn't do anything it just doesn't work (there's no "bad address" message box or anything that I can see that says the server isn't there).

How do you check to see if a stream is active on the server, things like whether VLC could connect or if its "getting anything" from the server?