VLC Streaming Playlists

[Schrodinger]

I'm sorry...I'm not really sure where to put this...
I originally wanted to stream play lists over my LAN, and could reliably get VLC to do this, however, it would drop at the first song change. A quick google search showed to to be a common enough problem, namely with "sout". I tried a few things, and did some shotgun debugging on my end,and discovered that the file created when I told it to stream a play list does, in fact, still stream if you let the play list cycle back through to it. One thing led to another, and I found out that I can stream whole play lists, but I need to to tell it to tell it to stream them all individually.

Ex. Ctrl+A to select the whole play list, and right click, tell it to stream, and do the quick set up. A file is created, and this streams, however, it cycles into the regular files again, and only the one file streams. This file is normally the last file selected, regardless of group size.

Needless to say, this gets very tedious very fast...is there something I'm doing wrong on my end? Or is this just a known bug? Also, I apologize if I was a little incoherent, I've been up a while...if I need to I can try and explain a little more clearly.

Thank you in advance

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Use --sout-keep

[Schrodinger]

I do, it doesn't work. Thats one of them problems. Its also all over the net how Sout-keep doesn't work. Most threads I see people trying to solve this problem in get pinned with "Sout-keep" and then they die. If I could of checked a small box and made it work I wouldn't of had to set each file to stream manually.

[CmdrData]

I too have the same issue as described above. It seems that I cannot build a list of items to stream easily using the controls. I'd expect that if I selected several of the playlist items and selected "stream", that would mean that that group would be then streamed, but only the last item selected (usually) is streamed, then the next item is played back locally. I did get a few items to show "streaming" in the display window and it did in fact stream those items one after another, however, setup is tedious. Once I did that, the client still dropped the connection after the first song change, but then I found the option to "Auto re-connect" in the HTTP(S) access modules under the preferences. That cured that issue with the client-side, however, still having issues building the streaming playlist.

Can someone please describe a way to simply stream a playlist?

[SawyerX]

Well I just recently found out that you can not strem .m3u lists with the new VLC anymore. So you must convert it to its new format XSPF and it will work.

However I have another problem with this. Now I cant manage to name the different streams really. They all keep the IP name when loaded with webiterface. And after changing 2 IPTV programs it always crashes.

[van_nostran]

i struggled for a little while with your problem as well. the play list would start to stream, and after the first item in the list finished VLC would begin to playback the file locally and stop the stream, sout definitely does not work if your problem has to do with local playback after 1st item in list - but i found something that did. this works on the new version of vlc (0.9.8a) using .xspf playlists - as far as i know, haven't tested otherwise.

the trick is to set the IP you allow people to connect to when setting up the stream, as opposed to leaving it blank (allow all)

im my case i:

Advanced open > locate my .xspf playlist > Stream > checkbox mmsh > type in my LAN IP (192.168.0.101) > chose my encapsulation (MPEG - TS) > and hit Stream

i have not attempted to stream externally to the wild wild web so i cant give you much advise there but im sure you can substitute your WAN IP for the LAN iP and see if that works

[uhilger]

I have the same two problems:

1. When I stream a playlist in M3U format the streaming stops after the first item.
2. When I stream a playlist in XSPF format the streaming continues but the client loses connection once one item is finished and the streaming goes to the next item.

Problem 2. above happens *although* I use option sout-keep. And I use HTTP streaming with an explicitly set IP address.

Has there been any progress on this?

[uhilger]

An update on my progress:

1)
It works when I start a streaming task from the command line using option --sout-keep. Both vlc as a client and Windows Media Player as a client work. The command I use for the streaming service is
vlc "Test.xspf" :sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=http,mux=raw,dst=192.168.178.36:8091}} --sout-keep

2)
It works when I start a streaming task without using sout-keep and I start the vlc client with option -R
Example: vlc "http://192.168.178.36:8091" -R

What I still have not found out is how I set option sout-keep in the vlc user interface when using it to set up a streaming service. As well I have not found out how to set option sout-keep in the VLM browser interface.

I'd still apreciate any help on this...

[uhilger]

if things could be always so simple... I've now found out how to use the VLM web interface to stream playlists uninterrupted too. The trick is to put option sout-keep into field 'options' of the broadcast section.

The trick in the web interface is to enter sout-keep without : or -- as a prefix

-duh

On a side note, here are my findings about usage of vlc so far:

- All this could be easy to find out if it was documented. The vlc documentation is simply a mess, completely unusable.
- vlc is not stable. It crashes often when using it as a stream server, at least on my Vista box. I use the web interface to avoid always having to go over to the server. But when it crashes often it is impossible to operate a remote vlc server.
- Both, the very time consuming 'trial and error' learning and the unstable operation inhibit a use in production.