[vlc-devel] Problems parsing udp:// URLs

[Valentin Gosu]

Hi Rémi,

The problem is that standards compliant browsers will turn udp://@
10.0.0.2:1234 to udp://10.0.0.2:1234 - because everything that's before
the @ character is username:password - and since it's empty it can be
ignored.
See
https://jsdom.github.io/whatwg-url/#url=dWRwOi8vQDEwLjAuMC4yOjEyMzQ=&base=YWJvdXQ6Ymxhbms=

As mentioned in bug 1949195
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1949195> and on
forum.videolan.org <https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=165823> this
makes clicking on udp URL in browsers not open the correct stream in VLC.
For now we have made an exception in Firefox for the udp scheme, but I
expect we want to remove the exception soon, again breaking the
functionality of these URLs.
udp://10.0.0.2:1234@ doesn't parse as a valid URL, so I'm wondering if VLC
could treat udp://10.0.0.2:1234 as being udp://@10.0.0.2:1234 ?

The only intent here is to keep old sites working for VLC users. Otherwise,
I understand you want to deprecate udp in favor of rtp links?

PS. I'm waiting on my gitlab account to be approved, then we can continue
the conversation in https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/29090

Thanks!

On Fri, 21 Mar 2025 at 17:54, Rémi Denis-Courmont <remi at remlab.net> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Le keskiviikkona 19. maaliskuuta 2025, 12.57.31 UTC+2 Valentin Gosu a
> écrit :
> > We would like to remove the exception for udp URLs, and let them be
> parsed
> > according to the URL standard.
> > Is it possible to change the way VLC parses udp URLs [4] so that it still
> > works if the @ character isn't present?
>
> The syntax is `udp://[SRC_IP][:SRC_PORT][@[DST_IP][:DST_PORT]]`. As you
> can
> see, the @ is already optional, so I don't see how it could be removed
> without
> breaking backward compatibility. And breaking compatibility would defeat
> the
> sole purpose of the scheme. We deprecated the raw UDP protocol in favor of
> RTP
> over 15 years ago. But people still insists on using it, and that's
> outside
> our control.
>
> > For example, for udp://@10.0.0.2:1234 the URL parser will remove the @
> and
> > turn it into udp://10.0.0.2:1234
> > Another case that needs to be addressed is udp://@:1234 as it currently
> > fails to parse with the URL standard [5].
>
> You will need to elaborate what you expect from VLC, because this request
> seems entirely unactionable to me.
>
> --
> Rémi Denis-Courmont
> Tapiolan uusi kaupunki, Uudenmaan entinen Suomen tasavalta
>
>
>
>
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