Well for multicast sessions there is SAP, but for video there isn't really something like DAAP. However you could look at Tryst.app
I think this basically does what you want for Broadcast instead of VoD, and it is built around VLC, so that's even better. I trust it could be adapted. (BTW, part of that technology should definetly start making it into upstream VLC)
Is there not anyway to configure miniSAP to announce VOD?
I'm trying to find something that would run on my Debian box, I thyought perhaps I could get miniVLCS to work, but I can't get it to compile.
No, because VoD require knowledge about the internals of what you stream and therefore needs to to what VLC does to retrieve that information. That's why it is only supported in VLC.
I can access them fine by typing in the above addresses, but is there no way to inform the instances of VLC running on other machines of the network that the VOD services are available? Is there no way of announcing the VOD services by means of a third-party system (like minisap does with streaming)?
This is for normal VLC streamoutput rtsp broadcast.
vlc -vvv input_stream --sout '#rtp{dst=192.168.0.12,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
For VoD with VLM i'm not sure how to do this.
Mmm, i actually checked and it seems the VoD core doesn't support SAP apparently. Strange i thought it did. OK, then i'm out of ideas