[vlc-devel] var_Set returns variable not found

[Olivier Aubert]

Hello

As I previously indicated, the libvlc API is basically a wrapper around
the internal VLC objects, and both worlds are isolated. You can consider
the vlc_object structure as internal to VLC, and not accessible to 3rd
party apps using libvlc. Except of course if you compile code that is
part of VLC, such as a plugin.

To achieve your specific goal here, you can use the MediaControl
display_text API. In python (easily translatatble to C) :

mc=vlc.MediaControl() # You can also pass an existing vlc_instance object
mc.playlist_add_item('foo.mpg') # In current SVN, it is now mc.set_mrl('foo.mpg')
mc.start()
mc.display_text("Jacques Boileau", 0, 5000)

but I agree that libvlc should not be so watertight, to allow more
experimentations, and provide some means to access at least variables
for named objects. But the libvlc API would then become less safe, i.e.
you would have plenty of rope to hang yourself.  Pierre is the person to
hassle for this (I wrote the mediacontrol API, and not the libvlc one).

On a side note: there once was python bindings for the internal VLC
object system, but it is not working anymore since more checks have been
added to prevent the use of vlc_object_* functions.

Olivier