The VideoLAN Forums

I want to play a video in VLC Media Player, click on a particular video frame, or press a special function key while a particular frame is playing, and open a browser window to the media whose URL I have embedded in that frame. And so on for successive frames, each with a URL to a different media file. How can I do this ? Maybe put each URL in a subtitle for a given frame and have VLC Media Player handle it as a URL somehow ?

Hi, what are the different URL? would you really have a different URL for every single frame?

Yes, each frame could contain a different URL, although it is possible that a few successive frames would contain the same URL.

What is the goal? There might be a better way to achieve what you want.

I want to have a mp4 file be able to access other video files for additional information. Think of the mp4 as a new kind of web page. VLC becomes a video browser. Video, unlike a web page, is of infinite extent. So each video file could enable one to access additional video within its extent. And only that one video file is required for each segment in time, unlike "save web pages" which has an awkward format and is hard to differentiate one segment in time from another.

Clicking on a web page identifies a point in space. I want to click on a video to identify and go to a point in time.

Ok so the point in time matching the last picture displayed is the identifier right? then you could have this working with a custom interactive video filter plugin mirrorring the input and having a special mouse_event handler for that.

You can link video frames to external media using hyperlinks. Hyperlinks allow you to link to any external media from within your video frames. To add a hyperlink to a video frame, select the frame and click the "link" icon. Then, enter the URL of the external media you would like to link to. Once you have entered the URL, click "apply" to save the hyperlink.

I'm familiar with linking a web page to images, since each image is a file and I can put a link in a web page to point to it, but how can one link a particular frame in a video to something ? The link, possibly one of many -- one for each chosen frame, would have to be stored in the video file, not in a web page, and the video viewer would have to be able to detect that link in the video and go to it. Is the process you are talking about a capability within certain versions of VLC, and if so, how are the links stored in the video file, and how does one tell VLC to look for and respond to them ?