The VideoLAN Forums

Hi,

I am building an Win32 application that display four videos using four libvlc_media_player_t.

Please could someone list the advantages and disadvantage of using separate calls to libvlc_new to create four instances of LibVLC, or to make 1 call to libvlc_new and three calles to libvlc_retain to create just a single instance?

From doxygen : "You can create one (or more) instance(s) of LibVLC in a given process, with libvlc_new() and destroy them with libvlc_release()."

I believe in the past (1.0.x) I would be required to make multiple instances of libvlc to get around some bugs in libvlc, but wondered if this has now changed with 1.1.x?

Chris

There are no benefits to creating multiple instances, other than simplifying your source code.

thanks, so no benefits but are there any drawbacks other than the extra source code? i.e. more memory usage, more threads etc?

In recent versions, there shouldn't be any thread on a bare libvlc instance, at least on Linux. Of course, it will require a little bit more memory, but that should be peanuts to the cost of a media instance.