The VideoLAN Forums

If I try and view an image URL from my media server (Windows Media Sharing in this case) it results in a 0 - second clip of a black screen.

Can you share the sample?

Well, I don't want to start spamming pictures of friends and co-workers across the internet. However it seems to be any image in my library, which are perfectly fine .jpg files. They open well if I navigate and open them via Media->Open File, although they have a 10 second play time then, instead of a static display. I can always pause. It's when I try and open them via Media->Open Network Stream that I get the 0 - second black screen.

You're right about images not being displayed properly when coming from a network.

Actually, the "fake" access module is needed to create a fake video out of a single image. And duration is set through the --fake-duration option (either a number of seconds or -1 for infinite time, default value is 10 sec)

For files on disk, vlc detects that they are still images and "fake" is the preferred access module in this case. So it works fine.

The thing is that for ressources coming from the network, an access module is already forced (either http, ftp, ...). And the image ends up being decoded as a regular video file. For jpg files, that means those are seen as mjpeg files with a single frame. So there is no error, just a fleeting image and a black screen.

For the time being, I 'm afraid the only solution is to first save images on a local disk and then view them with vlc.

Erwan10

Even then it hardly works. I have many problems with jpeg images atm. It looks as if it is trying to display the thumbnails of images instead of the images themselves and fails HARD. We had seen this before, and at that time i fixed it by making the mjpeg demux more clever, but it seems to be more difficult now.

Hum, maybe an OS issue ? Are you on MacOS ?

The issue with jpg files is to make sure no "file://" is added to their mrl (It may unfortunately be added implicitly ... ).

For example, on WinXP (vlc1.0-rc2),
- drap&drop on the vlc qt4 gui => works fine
- Open them with the Open File menu => works fine
- Opening them with the Open Dir menu => **doesn't** work fine (Opening a dir creates a xspf file that forcibly adds file://)

Erwan10

No that's not the problem, it crashes in ff_mjpeg_decode_sos from ffmpeg.

The issue with jpeg images crashing VLC Mac OS X was traced to the usage of the llvm compiler. We have switched ffmpeg back to normal gcc (since only vlc core requires llvm) and the issue now seems solved.