[vlc-devel] Out Dated Documentation

[Geoffroy Couprie]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Grae Cullen <tua57044 at temple.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>    I had two questions about your documentation.  Since, it
> is no longer correct, maybe you could fill me in a bit.  In
> exchange I will update your hacker's guide wiki with your answers.

I copied an old documentation on this page, so it's a bit outdated.
When I wrote it, I didn't know much about the VLC code, so I left the
documentation to work on code and come back later. Feel free to
correct or add documentation.

>
>    Here is the first question.  It refers to this this statement.
>
> "At first, an input plug-in capable of reading the plugin item
> is looked for [this is inappropriate : we should first open
> the socket, and then probe the beginning of the stream to see
> which plug-in can read it]. The socket is opened by either
> input_FileOpen, input_NetworkOpen, or input_DvdOpen."
>
> These three functions no longer exist in current vlc code.
> What is their current equivalent?  This relates to be wanting
> to follow the process of the code to see what decoders is chosen.

Now, the input part in LibVLC tries the access modules to determine
which one can open the media. Each access module has an Open function
accessible by a callback. The input uses this function in each module
with the MRL you provided. It can choose directly the right module
with shortcuts: "file://..." tells LibVLC that you want the file
access module. If the right access module is found, it then tries to
find a demux module. You can find this part of the code in
src/input/input.c
>
> The second question refers this statement:
>
> "The most important file is include/input_ext-intf.h, which
> you should know almost by heart. This file defines the
> input_thread_t structure, the stream_descriptor_t and all
> programs and ES descriptors included (you can view it as a tree)."
>
> Where are these structures defined?  include/input_ext-intf.h
> no longer exists.  I found 400+ references to input_thread_t,
> and and zero for stream_descriptor_t.  I am mainly interested
> in this because I would like to better understand how to
> change the responses to the interface in certain input modules.
>
You can find the input_thread_t in vlc_input.h. It seems
stream_descriptor_t doesn't exist anymore, now it may be stream_t. It
is used in src/input/stream.c

I'll go on with this documentation when most of my work on VLC will be
done, but I can help you to improve it until then.

Regards,

Geoffroy