How to set no password for web interface?

PaulMerton · Postby **PaulMerton** » 26 May 2015 02:31

Just updated to Jessie, with VLC off deb-multimedia (VLC media player 2.2.1 Terry Pratchett (Weatherwax) (revision 2.2.1-0-ga425c42)), and have found I cannot get VLC's web interface to work with no password specified. I tried --http-password "", but that set the password to be 2 quotation marks.

I am just getting
"Password for Web interface has not been set.

Please use --http-password, or set a password in

Preferences > All > Main interfaces > Lua > Lua HTTP > Password."

There doesn't seem to be a way to just have no u/p prompt.

Am I right that the web interface now relies on stuff off Google too, I think I saw ajax.google.blah in NoScript? I think the web UI can be modified, but without hacking at the system can that be changed without risk of updates undoing my changes? Can a copy of the httpd directory be run out my home, for instance? Without internet access requiring Google means the web UI cannot work, and personally I think involving the world's biggest advertising company is not good for user privacy (or insert any other Google critique here).

Cheers

PaulMerton · Postby **PaulMerton** » 26 May 2015 03:17

Just found the "wontfix" bug for this. https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/9671 Laughable, 'cause it claims to be about keeping the unwanted out, but then Google are dragged in?

And the password requirement is enforced on local connections, which means it has been assumed that all http access will come from off the machine, not from 127.0.0.1:

Code: Select all

$ wget -O - http://127.0.0.1:8080/mobile.html
--2015-05-26 02:07:50--  http://127.0.0.1:8080/mobile.html
Connecting to 127.0.0.1:8080... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 507 [text/html]
Saving to: ‘STDOUT’

-                                                 0%[                                                                                                          ]       0  --.-KB/s             <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" /><title>VLC media player</title></head><body><p>Password for Web interface has not been set.</p><p>Please use --http-password, or set a password in </p><p>Preferences > All > Main interfaces > Lua > Lua HTTP > Password.</p><!-- VLC_PASSWORD_NOT_SET --><-                                               100%[=========================================================================================================>]     507  --.-KB/s   in 0s     

2015-05-26 02:07:50 (15.2 MB/s) - written to stdout [507/507]

So if a user has a web-powered widget on their desktop, a browser on a 2nd monitor, etc., they are forced to use a password. It could even be viewed that needless password enforcement actually encourages poor password or security practices in users. The most hypothetical of first-time computer users would be happy for things to be like that, but with just a little experience users stand to be confused as to why no password, even for localhost access (let alone subnet), is not a possibility.

Looks like I might just kill two birds with one stone to solve this, add a separate php-based web interface for VLC. No password prompts, no 3rd party code execution requirements (or hacks to get them local), maybe no JS requirements at all.

Postby **Rémi Denis-Courmont** » 26 May 2015 08:47

You install the Deb Multimedia crap and you expect to get support here? Laughable.

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How to set no password for web interface?

How to set no password for web interface?

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