[vlc] Redirecting input to vlc from file and obtaining stats information in file

[Priya]

Hi all!

I have been beating my head against this problem for over 4 days now... Its
getting to a point where I may quit from VLC altogether... so this is really
a desperate cry for help !

What I essentially want to achieve is to play a video and while this it is
running I want to collect statistics like lost frames, bit rate etc. into
another text file. The stats should be collected every x seconds while the
video is running.

VLC help <http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_command-line_help> says that the
--stats option can be used to collect the stats:

>
> --stats, --no-stats        Locally collect statistics (default enabled)
>           Collect miscellaneous local statistics about the playing media.
>           (default enabled)
>
> Can someone please tell me where these stats are stored and how I would be
able to read them into another application? If there is a way to read where
these stats are stored, I could write a wrapper code that reads the relevant
stats and then sleeps for the remaining time in a loop.

I tried several other approaches to get the information about the
statistics. Here are some of the things which I tried and the difficulty in
proceeding with each approach:


   1. I can access the stats manually from the GUI while the video is being
   played from Tools -> Media Information -> Statistics. However, I do not know
   how to automate the process of reading the stats in a loop and writing them
   to a file.
   2. I can use the "rc" interface to get the statistics on the command
   line. To open the interface in the terminal I do: "vlc --intf rc", then
   doing "add filename.mpg" plays the video and "stats" shows the stats on the
   terminal. If I start the "rc" interface using "vlc --intf rc >
   outputfile.txt", I can redirect the output of the "stats" command, but I
   still don't know how to redirect the input to the "rc" interface from say a
   bash script that starts the video waits for 2 seconds and then issues the
   "stat" command...
   3. I tried redirecting input and output as shown by this
blog<http://n0tablog.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/controlling-vlc-via-rc-remote-control-interface-using-a-unix-domain-socket-and-no-programming/#comment-10825>.
   But it does not seem to work. What I did was I set the rc and fake tty
   interface as shown in steps 2 and 3 and then tried to use "nc" to channel
   the commands from and input file to "vlc.sock". The command I used was "nc
   -U /home/pbhat/vlc.sock >> emd.temp < 'stats.sh' "....but that does not
   work.

Can some one please give me some advice on how to do this.
Thanks!


-- 
Priya Bhat
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