[vlc-devel] Multiple instances and/or multiple players

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

I'm looking at the LibVLC API... and I'm wondering why we need to support both 
multiple instances per process _and_ multiple players per instance?

Compared to multiple instances, different players within the same instance 
additionnally share the configuration, the message log, and hmm... that's 
about it. Now that I think about it, this seems a bit like an anti-feature.

Leaving VLM alone, is there anything that you can do with multiple players in 
the same instance, that you cannot do with multiple instances with one player 
each?

Oh - an instance also has a playlist too, but LibVLC does not use the 
playlist. In fact, I think we should try to only create the playlist object, 
or at least the playlist thread in the "VLC" case.

Note that the module cache, which is by far the most memory-hungry and slowest 
to load component, is a process singleton. In other words, it is shared across 
instances. And so is the thread subsystem which has extremely little state 
anyway.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/