The VideoLAN Forums

I am using vlcj 1.2.2 and the new official VLC 2.0 build on a Windows 32 machine. However, now when I try to set my plugin path (using System.setProperty("VLC_PLUGIN_PATH", some path) it cannot find the plugins. I have tried several variations of this and it only seems to work when the plugins folder is in the same directory as libvlc, which leads me to believe that this may be an issue where libvlc isn't properly using the VLC_PLUGIN_PATH Is anyone else having these issues or am I doing something improperly? Thanks.

So I've discovered that VLC_PLUGIN_PATH must be an environment variable, not a Java System property. However this makes VLC extremely unportable when using java because you cannot alter any client's environment variables within java code (I don't know how easy this is for a .NET app either). Are there no more alternatives now that --plugin-path is gone?

Environment variables are the only portable way to define process-wide parameters. So the answer is no.

Prior to this update --plugin-path could be used though, that didn't make use of environment variables I don't believe. Is there a particular reason why this was disabled?

It made no sense to pass "--plugin-path" to libvlc_new() considering that the plugin path, by design, is shared across all instances in the process.

Hello dbauschl,
i had the same problem and the setting of VLC_PLUGIN_PATH didn't work either. Rémi Denis-Courmont gives me the advice that my MRL was wrong. I used f.e. "J:\videos\test.avi" it doesn't work and if i use "file:///j:\videos\test.avi" it works and plays the video...

Setting the VLC_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable doesn't seem to be working. libvlc_new always returns null unless I put the plugins directory in the directory with the executable, no matter how I try to set the Environment variable. I am using 2.0.1, I tried 2.1 and the same thing happened, I got the No Plugins Found! error.

Setting the VLC_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable doesn't seem to be working. libvlc_new always returns null unless I put the plugins directory in the directory with the executable, no matter how I try to set the Environment variable. I am using 2.0.1, I tried 2.1 and the same thing happened, I got the No Plugins Found! error.

The phrase "no matter how I try to set the Environment variable" is not as useful as actually showing what you've tried. As you saw a couple of posts above yours, there's an example of a working environment variable.

The previous comments don't prove that there was a working environment variable, but that their fix was using a correct mrl.
I've tried, with several path locations, with several different path attempts: I've also tried using C# right before making the managed call to libvlc_new using, with several different path attempts: Ive also, actually set the Environment Variable on my computer. Still to no avail.

Got it! My apologies. Good luck.