[vlc-devel] Plugin development - add access module without (re-)compiling the whole VLC

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le mardi 2 février 2010 19:59:29 Mario Hock, vous avez écrit :
> my name is Mario Hock, I'm working for the University of Karlsruhe
>  (Germany) on a new VLC streaming module.
> 
> If you wanna know more about the module, I can provide some more
>  information, of course. ;-)
> 
> I would like to run my module on machines where I don't have root
>  privileges. (Linux by the way.)
> 
> The problem is, it's very hard to get all build dependencies without root
>  access on these machines

It's quite easy with the VLC contribs system.

>  and I hoped that: a) there's a way to compile VLC
>  static linked and just copy the binary to the other machines.

Not really. VLC (or more precisely libvlccore) has to be a dynamic library for 
reentrancy from the plugins.

>  or b) add
>  the module to an already installed VLC. (I tried to just copy the libs in
>  the "libs" folder but this didn't work out.)

Link the plugin statically against your import library, but *dynamically* 
against libvlccore. That's what the in-tree live555 plugins does as an 
example. For the sake of simplicity, I'd recommend building the missing 
underlying libraries as static only.

Then you need to copy the plugin to a user directory and configure VLC to load 
plugins from that directory (--plugin-path=...).

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis