The VideoLAN Forums

Is it possible to use VST plugins,for example Kjaerhus Classics,withVLC.If yes, how?
Thanks in advance.
FD

No. It's not possible.
Sorry

It is a pity & that´s why I will stay, at least for the time being, with my good old customized Winamp for Music & MV2 player for anything visual.I have VLC installed on my PC but it is still incomplete for my taste.The possibility to use VST EQ &/or other devices would greatly improve VLC , wich has anyway a promising future.
From Brasil.FD

You can fill in a ticket (flag it as "enhancement") on http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ and pray that someone feels like coding it

Prey hard! No offence to the developers.

Is it possible to use VST plugins,for example Kjaerhus Classics,withVLC.If yes, how?
Thanks in advance.
FD

what would this be good for ?! i dont see any practical sense. just some kind of "fun" ? i am sure from 1000 users only 1 would ever make use of it yet. maybe u want to start a poll on that who would make regular use of it. im sure 99% will say - no use

You seem to really like the idea of starting polls. How about this poll:

I would very much love to see VST plugins support in VLC. I find VLC sounding particularly clean and accurate, and as a sound engineer I can't really think about using anything else, but we (sound engineers) in a real need to be able to run room correction plugins on media players (ARC2, for example). ATM, foobar and winamp are the only players which I know of, that can do this, it's a real shame we can't load that in VLC. Any chance of you guys doing VST support in VLC ?

As far as I recall, the conclusion was that this is not feasible due to licensing problems - or probably would not be redistributable. And then, nobody wants to pay for it with their time or their money.

Ohh, that's a shame if that's the case (not being free, that is). Adding VST support seems like such a brilliant idea. In fact, I came here looking for that.

I mean, turning VLC into a VST host would give access to the huge selection of professional grade plugins that is currently available. It's the de-facto plugin standard in the music/audio world.

It would also mean that VLC's developers wouldn't have to write all sorts of equalizers, compressors, limiters and visualizers themselves. And VST exists for both Windows, Mac and, as far as I know, also Linux, so it would even be fairly cross-platform.

It makes me wonder if it could be implemented by a 3rd party as one of those plugins/audio_filter/ filters, or if that would require a recompile every time a new VLC was released? Just brainstorming here.

Lots of freeware software has support for loading VST plugins, for example OBS. There are also VST loaders for WinAmp. So this seems to hint that the license issue may not be a problem after all.

I believe The VLC dev team could save a lot of work by simply implementing this, instead of trying to maintain all the equalizers, compressors and what not that are currently built into VLC, and which don't work anywhere as well as the huge collection of VST plugins out there.

Since when is the WinAmp license even remotely similar to that of VLC?

I was just wondering if VST's could be used in VLC... This has answered my question.
Tbh, I never understood why anyone would want it, but for years I've been fed up with watching stuff through VLC and having to keep adjusting the volume.
When watching many films, for example, the dialogue is often very quiet and the action nearly blows the speakers!!! Great for cinemas, crap when watching indoors.

I have tried using VLC's builtin EQ and Compressor to tame volumes a bit, but I'm not really sure how to use a compressor to act as a kind of limiter. Whatever I set it to, it doesn't really make much difference. Perhaps a transparent limiter would be a better bet if VST's aren't feasible.

Not sure why licensing is an issue wrt VST's anyway, many other apps have VST compatibility. Not that I'm moaning about it, would be handy, if only for that one single usage of having a decent limiter on the audio output.

Whatever happens, thanks for all your hard work, I'm sure everybody appreciates your time and effort!

However many apps support VST is besides the point, if none of them are copyleft open-source. AFAICT and FWIW, mpv and FFmpeg do not support VST either.

Ok, so apart from the license thing, is there anyway to achieve limiting of the audio output?

I really want VST support so I use proper compressors and limiters with VLC. I mean, limiting the audio output would be easier if the compressor had a higher ratio say, 100:1

My issue with the in built compressor though is that it has no visual feedback so you can't see what it's actually doing.


VST's would be great with VLC, I have a ton of dynamic limiters I could use.

Here we find the license requirements from Steinberg.
Its states GPLv3
https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_d ... tions.html

https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
VLC on the other hand is using GPLv2

I have not looked into that in detail, however, I cannot imagine this to be the reason we cannot do it.

Beyond that, I think its simple a mail to reception@steinberg.de to inform them.
However, as I undestand the text, this is optional, since we are simply using a public licence GPLv3 and the code will be based on the public VST SDK.
from here https://github.com/steinbergmedia/vst3sdk.

Apart from that, VST is NOT rocket science. From 2002-2004 I worked for Steinberg, and implemented FIrewire drivers (yeah it existed back then),
and I tried to refactor the VST3 audio engine to add another network audio driver, trying to sync an additional networked audio device into the VST audio engine.
Well, I learned that created significant synchronization issues.
Network audio is NOT trivial, maybe not quite like Rocket science, but clean audio synchronisation over networks is not far from Rocket Science

So wiring the VST audio engine into the vlc code cannot be very hard.
But having said the things above, resynchronizing the audio buffers with other parallel video streams is NOT trivial. Its done in Nuendo, but it uses a complex audio engine
based on a lot of engineering knowledge about synchronization in Steinberg Media.

I am eying up spectrograms, I tried to find a spectrogram plugin and failed.
Since there are free ones for VST I noticed the missing VST Host implementation.

As a Senior I am pretty much out of coding since more than a decade. However, with AI support, there are new approaches have manifested.

I am happy to contribute my experience to support a developer or a team in a project adding the VST Host code to vlc.
As I said its not Rocket Science, we merely need to understand audio processing in blocks of various sizes and sample rates, causing varying degrees of delay.
This delay needs to be understood in order to control the machinery and obtain useful results.

For the simple visualization use case or a spectrogram which is write only, and we dont care if its a few milliseconds off, this should be straightforward (I just swallowed the word trivial...

Any takers?