[vlc-devel] Chromecast design

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le 2015-10-27 14:00, Steve Lhomme a écrit :
> I am currently working on the Chromecast plugin(s) for VLC. There's
> currently a plugin that is a sout wrapper but it assumes the
> Chromecast is "playback slave" and VLC is the master. In reality this
> is not how the Chromecast works. The Chromecast is the player with 
> its
> own buffering, timing and multiple controllers possible
> (play/pause/exit).

You can disable VLC pacing when using the stream output (as the 
conversion wizard does). You would "only" need a new HTTP server. If you 
do that, then pause/resume should work just fine. However you can 
fundamentally not disable input pacing anyway, so you cannot rely on the 
remote receiver being able to control the pace.

You can also not assume that the track formats will stay constant, thus 
limiting your choice of muxer, or imposing transcoding almost always. 
Not to mention the rat hole with multiple tracks of the same category.

You can not assume that stream output will handle seeking correctly, 
and even if it did, it would not work with plain HTTP nor with segmented 
HTTP streaming. Both of those would require prior off-line conversion.

Overall, it seems that you painted yourself into a corner already. You 
need to be a bit realistic about what the VLC stream output can do, what 
else VLM and/or VoD could do, and what is either out-of-scope (e.g. 
general purpose HTTP server) or not possible at all (seeking or 
buffering live content).

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