The VideoLAN Forums

I am pretty new in VideoLan. I wonder if someone can help me doing this task.

I know the VLC player can read in mp4 and stream it out. I want to do one step further. Instead of reading from mp4, I want to pick up some picture jpg (or png) files from a folder and stream it out in mpeg4 or h264 format. Some other program will constantly feed that folder with new jpg (or png) files.

I am thinking maybe I can modify some of the VLC player source code, some files in C program I guess, to do this. I have downloaded the VLC source code and look into it. It is as deep as a jungle. I think I may need just a little portion of the codes.

Can someone give me a hint of how to proceed? I can either do it in Windows, or in Linux (Debian or Ubuntu).

Any suggestion will help.

Thanks a lot.

vlc /path/to/folder will work, but it will not reload when there are new pictures.

You definitely need some scripting here. For myself I made this one, it picks up *.asf files from a folder and streams them out. And yes, other program sometimes feeds that folder with new ones.

Script is for windows/powershell. It speaks with VLC via HTTP. You'll need to slightly change the VLM command sequence (they're somewhere in the end), because now it stops the previous broadcasting and creates a new one for each new file instead of adding files to a current playlist.