How to play an input normally but with no output at all

[gegefr]

Hi, this might seem weird but i need to be able to "play" a video with vlc but without any video nor audio output, on linux.

Our goal is to simulate multiple users playing youtube videos so we'd like to be able to start dozens of VLC process, playing some Youtube videos and see how much buffering happens depending on network's health, number of youtube watchers, and other concurrent traffic.

Watching for video interruptions caused by buffering is OK with VLC is started with -vv (only have to watch for logs).
Playing a youtube video with the GUI is OK.
Playing a youtube video with --sout => /dev/null is almost OK too, there is no output at all, however it seems to download the video "as fast as it cans", wich is normal since --sout is made for transcoding or remuxing.

Is there a way, while using --sout, to tell VLC to respect the normal framerate ?

Thanks in advance.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Depending on what exactly you want:
vlc -A dummy -V dummy
vlc --noaudio --novideo

[gegefr]

Thanks !

"-A dummy -V dummy" seems to be exactly what i want (still get the data but don't show them at all, no need for --sout.

It's a lot more cpu-intensive, but i guess that's because the codec has to be decoded properly to respec framerate ?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Yes.

[gegefr]

Okay, thanks for your quick answers !