The VideoLAN Forums

Or the idea is to open a forum where we can post our frustrating experiences with vlc streaming without even the hope of ever getting a useful reply?
Most (all?) of the posts contain pertinent questions and they *never* get a useful reply.
Having a great program filled with useful undocumented features is as good as nothing.

Davide.

You just voiced out my thoughts. I was about to post the exact same message to the question I asked yesterday.

I'd be happy to just get an install script, an RPM, or a human that can install a NON-GUI version on a web server (with a commercial operating system - i.e. RHEL/CentOS) and solve the insane number of dependencies that just keep kicking my a$$ every time I try it myself.

Seriously guys, *real* servers do not have GUI components installed. Why is there no command-line-only version? I've brought it up a few times here over the last year and all I ever see is "VLS is broken and obsolete - use VLC"

I'd rather remove my own spleen with a rusty fork than use a Windows machine for my project, but I don't think I have a choice. The Linux version simply won't install on my platform of choice.

I wish I had the programming chops to fork VLS and maintain a real (i.e. command line only) server version that works on professional platforms. The VLC team seems to speak only "GUI" and "Fedora"

Anyway, enough whining. As usual I'm just talking to myself and a couple of other lost souls anyway. Over the years, I've noticed that the official sites and forums for an OSS project are rarely the place for non-geeks and non-developers to get any help. (SourceForge forums are usually ghost towns) You have to find general forums and newsgroups. Average folks are infinitely more helpful that programmers because they know what it's like to be frustrated by useless documentation that expects you to already know the answer to every question.

A lot of people are answered on this forum, so if noone answers you, it may be because you are unclear, you did not explain what you really wanted, you asked an obvious question or that noone knows.

@soundguy, VLC is a server and a client, it as a Command line GUI, and does NOT need any GUI, if you had read just a bit the documentation.

A lot of people are answered on this forum, so if noone answers you, it may be because you are unclear, you did not explain what you really wanted, you asked an obvious question or that noone knows.

Before writing: "Most (all?) of the posts contain pertinent questions and they *never* get a useful reply" I did a check. I wrote most, I do confirm: most.
I found several well explained, relevant questions, with no answer whatsoever.
Of course I'm not saying somebody from the development team should be forced to meaningfully reply all posted questions, but I really don't understand what this forum is about. Collecting frustrated users?

Davide.

But we do provide a place where frustrated users can vent there emotions and we even provide emotions to help this along!

Now! Don't you feel better? Of coarse you do. Ask any therapists.

I've read docs and Wikis for hours until I'm blue in the face. The issue is not how it's used. The issue is that I can't get it to INSTALL on a commercial non-GUI OS like RHEL/CentOS. All libraries, RPMs, how-tos, etc seem to be for hobby, uber-geek, & bleeding edge distros. Installing from source on a minimal server platform throws 25 or 30 dependency errors and the dependencies are not solvable. The RPM gives me the same results.

Since much of the functionality of VLC seems to rely on GUI-centric packages being present, I suppose that it installs easily on a desktop platform, but I've experience nothing but complete failure time and time again trying to build a working version on CentOS 4.4

If this was a Unix-only app, I'd just shut the hell up and deal with it, but since it installs on Windows in under 2 minutes with zero errors, I kind of expected that eventually someone would have been motivated to develop a one-click installer for the commercial Unices, just for consistency if nothing else.

Out of curiosity, has anyone gotten VLC up & running on Solaris?

Well, that is true that RHEL and CentOS are not used a lot by the developers, however, last time I checked on the latest RHEL, I was able to install it...

Using the rpm from livna.

The fact that noone helps us to maintain the packages is NOT our fault, and the fact that RHEL/CentOS repositories and rpms are a mess is not our fault either.

There are a lot of questions about livna RPMs and a lot of them are solved at the end of the thread. viewtopic.php?t=31880&highlight=livna

Anyway VLC has a modular approach and the GUIs are just one of the modules. Therefore VLC is not at all GUI-centric as you seem to say. There are at least four different interface that are not GUIs.

For example, on debian, you have vlc-noX, which is just the VLC without the guis, the fact that it does not exist on your particular distribution is that people don't care enough to do it. And still that is not our fault.

Come on, no one is paid, there is no foundation, we have no money and we work just on free time, do you really think we should put a lot of extra time just for a distribution we can't even afford to pay ?

About VLC and solaris, just to end my answer, yes, some people have done it in the past and one person is just doing it now for the recent trunk.

Most messages get replied ? How 'bout all those people trying to do VOD behind NAT ?

The question about VOD behind a NAT is mostly a technical question that noone really knows how to answer here and depends a lot on the configuration.

Go and ask on IRC.

the problem is that most problems are not experienced by all the vlc users...


so the solution to this problem is that you need to first try basic fixes, like:

1. uninstalling and reinstalling or just updating latest drivers,

2. doing the same with vlc with deleted preferences, cache and regestry entries,

3. and in case of scripts, check for WRONG SPELLINGS, the scripter's worst enemy.

4. also check the size of files to be played/transcoaded and see if they are capable on your computer(check your ram and processor speed)

only then ask for solutions.

i dunno why I used the word problem this many times in the first few lines...

"go ask on IRC" is a reply that might be useful, and I'll definitely do that . But it doesn't appear in asnwers to the questions, so I didn't think of that (yes, me n00b). Yes, I know it's on the help page, as well as recommendations to use mailing lists =0)

[quote="j-b"]A lot of people are answered on this forum, so if noone answers you, it may be because you are unclear, you did not explain what you really wanted, you asked an obvious question or that noone knows.[/quote]

Please read viewtopic.php?t=37221 and tell me if there is "no answer" or my question was unclear or simply noone wants to answer or noone can.

Simple answers like "stream from and to localhost for testing on the same machine is impossible" would help already.

Setsuna