VLC and commercial broadcasting

[bengineer]

Hello all,

my name is ben, and i'm an "engineer" at a small TV station in canada. i have used vlc on my personal machines for years, perhaps not expertly, and it is the tool i reach for when nothing else will play a video at work, which is surprisingly often considering we literally have millions of dollars of video equipment here. i have a couple questions about the appropriateness of vlc in my workplace.

to start off, i don't "officially" load vlc on any machines here because of legal concerns. we used to have a really awesome network guy here who swore up and down that vlc uses unauthorized codecs, and that we could get sued for having it on our machines and or using it in our workflow. how true is that? keep in mind that canada generally grabs its ankles and thinks of the queen whenever the US tells us what our laws will be, so these issues will be very similar to in the united states. would i, say, be doing something illicit if i played an .mov to air using vlc? can we use it to "shot list" items in an offline capacity?

secondly, can VLC interface with SDI/HD-SDI playout or capture cards? i'm generally a windows person, mostly because im totally inept at command line linux and because apple makes the very worst computers known to man (i know this for a fact, as we exclusively use finalcut for our NLE needs), but if their are solutions in any operating system i would be willing to give them a try. if it can work in SDI, can it also handle either encoded non picture lines (like line 21 for CC) or VANC data? really my question is if i play say an excam-hd.mov file with closed captions in VANC or on line 21 with VLC, will either a SDi/digital display be able to read those closed captions, or can vlc make analog NTSC with CC on a non-video line 21?

okay. so those are pretty specific questions i guess. i don't really Need specific answers, and information is good information.

also, just as a note to any developers reading this, it used to be super simple to stream udp video with vlc like 3 years ago, but i recently tried with a new version and found it (in fact any streaming) unbelievably confusing and difficult. i realize you were trying to make vlc do more and make it easier, but thats not what i have experienced with current version. not a complaint really, i love the software, just a comment from an end user.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

1) Yes, in the USA, most codecs are patented and Mpeg-LA considered you must have a license from them. However, VLC is not "unauthorized" nor "illegal", since it is perfectly fine here. Moreover, noone will annoy you, as you are very small. Bigger US companies use VLC without issues...

2) Yes, VLC 1.2 on Linux supports Blackmagic SDI and ComputerModules SDI cards for input. On windows, it might work with the DShow input, but I don't know.
VLC supports 608 for CC and SCTE-20.

SDI output is not really existant yet.

[bengineer]

thanks for the info.

my guess is that there is no SDI out because VLC sends video to the desktop rather than providing a direct video stream, is that more or less correct? are there ways to get VLC to output analog NTSC directly rather than providing (even full screen) video to a desktop? like, full field video, hidden CC and timecode lines and everything?

hope you are having a great day. today i realized, after 4 months of freezing rain, than it smells much much worse in my city when it is sunny outside

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

SDI output will come, but probably raw, so I don't know about hidden CC.