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

[Pierre d'Herbemont]

Hi Remi,

On Aug 17, 2009, at 9:41 PM, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:

> 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?

Right, this look is something that should not even be exposed at the  
API level in my opinion. The only visible (and useful) effect is to be  
able to effectively play multiple files.

A few things come to my mind:
- multiple instances is not something that is being tested a lot in VLC.
- I am a bit candid here, but what is the effective performance  
impact? do you have any numbers?
- Do we want to allow sharing of input item between different  
instance? How much do we want to make sure we can share between two  
instances?
- Cache: All cached data will be into globals? How do you plan to  
flush caches? AFAIK this was the only goal of libvlc_new,  
libvlc_release.
- Having multiple audio output could be problematic in some platform,  
and doing audio mixing ourselves is then a great plus. How do you do  
that with one instance?

That said, this is an implementation details, how do you plan to  
reflect that on the API?

Pierre.