vlc and stdout

[Christophe Massiot]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2001, Jens Eliasson wrote:

> My question is this: Is it possible to have the client to write the
> MPEG-stream to stdout instead of the screen?
> We are planning to use the VideoLan server and client to transport our
> stream over an IP-network, and then connect the VideoLan client to a

Is your stream actually an MPEG-2 stream from the beginning ? Otherwise
you will need an encoder first.

> program called mplayer (that we use the get the picture out on a
> Matrox-card).
> Since mplayer can read from stdin the only thing left is to get VideoLan
> client to write to stdout.

I don't understand what you want to do with mplayer that you can't
already do with VLC. VLC is a a fully compliant MPEG2 decoder. If you're
missing some features, please speak.

To specifically answer your question, no you can't redirect VLC's input to
stdout. For one simple reason : VLC reads Transport Stream format from
the network, and the decoder understands TS natively. Other decoders
such as mplayer only understand Program Stream format. VLC isn't a
TS to PS converter, so you cannot directly read with mplayer the
stream read by VLC's input. 

-- 
Christophe Massiot.