The VideoLAN Forums

Alright, so I've spent that last couple of days doing research on possible ways to have my entire video library on one PC open for On-Demand streaming to other PC's in my local Area Network.

What I mean is if I am on my other laptop computer, I want to be able to browse all the files on my main PC and select which one I want to stream, and control it from the laptop. Think Netflix, except the video library is within my own hard drive.

Essentially my searches have yielded very little. The ONLY thing that I have come up with is this www.mhive.org project that seems discontinued. There is a lot of talk about VLC being able to be a VOD streaming server, but from the dozens of threads and websites i've read and tried, none of it is what i'm looking for. I am not trying to command line this process, and it seems that VLC Media Player's development is moving in this direction, as you can see a lot of different GUI options to set up some sort of VOD streaming service.

On to my main question: So I enabled the HTTP control interface for VLC, and I notice that I am able to browse all of my media files from the website, play them, fast forward, change volume, etc from this webpage. There is a button called "Easy Stream" however. I am confused as to what this feature is meant to be. If I click "Easy Stream", does it open up a live stream of the video I have selected? Is this the solution I am essentially looking for? Is this feature still in development and basically bugged/placeholder?

I have done some investigating and I have tried to use this feature to live stream, however each time I click on it I get a generic web error: "del : Current: media unknown". On the server side, a popup gives me the message:
"VLC is unable to open the MRL file: path/to/file"
The problem is the "path/to/file isn't correct. What it displays is "path/to/VideoLAN/Directory/C:/PathToFile". This looks like it gets the path to the file incorrectly because it appends the path to the file to some other string that is the path to VideoLAN's directory?

Here is what I mean this is the raw output:
Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'file:///C:/Program%20Files%20%28x86%29/VideoLAN/VLC/%2FC%3A%2FFolder%2FGuest%2FBooks%2C%20Games%2C%20Music%2C%20Movies%2C%20TV%20Shows%2FMovies%2F007%2F007%20Quantum%20Of%20Solace.avi'. Check the log for details.

So first it navigates to the VIDEOLAN directory in Program Files then just appends the path to the file I selected from the web interface. Is this a bug?

And regardless of this bug, is it possible to use the web interface to pick a movie and live stream it On-Demand?

So, yes, the easy stream of the WebUI (probably broken) is supposed to send the video from the machine running VLC to the machine viewing the webbrowser

I see. Is there a way to know when the next update for VLC Media player is coming out so I can anticipate a possible fix to this? Or perhaps anything I can do to help the developers fix this bug?

Do you know js and css, and html? Do you know lua?

Not particularly. I have extensive experience with C and C++ and have dabbled with python. For the most part my programming skills exist on the low level.

Well, you can learn
Those are pretty simple

Please let me know whether the VLC Web Interface and VOD Streaming is scheduled to be repaired or whether a temporary fix is available. Thanks

Same issue here, have installed all previous and recent versions of VLC to check this. It is a VLC bug, fore sure. I have tested to play the playlist from:

: Dreambox with server on my Windows 7 PC. ->playlist cannot be openend. If file in playlist has been dubbel clicked first at PC playlist, then it can be loaded in Dreambox, but not played.
and
: When opening webinterface on PC playlist is presented as an "?" instead of names...so also an error here. When dubbel clicking the file directly in VLC' playlist at same computer and after this refreshing the webinterface, the file is presented...here instead of an "?"


So, i googled for almost 1 week now, and nobody has a solution. Please find a fix for this, because, the major advandage of VLC is the streaming possibillity which is now not 100% functional.

P.s. Playing files directly through browsing, works till VLC version 1.11.1, above this also doesnt work from client to server. MLR....cannot be openened.

Must be something with conversion of path names and file references I guess.....

So....regards
Vincent

@Simba01:

I have been working on something like this myself, but using a generic http server to serve the movies (via the http protocol) and VLC as a client to play them in the browser.

I hit a roadblock in that department, because I found VLC didn't behave well as a client requesting a 2.5 GBs movie in a single response rather than make multiple partial responses. A post I made about this can be found here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgr ... gLZ3lWUNAJ

I looked for a way to fine tune how the VLC plugin behaves as a client in these forums and found this promising lead:
http://www.revolunet.com/static/downloa ... anced.html

Anyways, don't expect a release for this tomorrow, because I'm working on this as a side project, but if I can finally get over this hurdle and complete this, I'll be sure to post the link here.