Video on my LAN

Was origially posted at bitfever.blogspot.com on Sat Jan 03, 10:51

Today version 0.7.0 of the famous VLC (VideoLAN Client) for Mac OS X was released. The UI is much better now (ok, playback controls for every window would be nice).
I can't say much about the new Codecs supported, but while playing around my eyes stumbled across somthing called HTTP interface. After digging a bit I found that ther is a simple way you can remote control anything VLC plays via a webbrowser.
Here is how you do it:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I http --http-src ./share/http/

You can now reach the interface by pointing the browser of your choice towards http://localhost:8080
This is for Mac OS X with VLC stored in /Applications; note that the Template for the HTML interface is located inside the .app package.
Something like this will probably also work on other Unix-like OSes, if you ajust the pathnames; it may even work with Windows, but I'm not about to try that.


A nice thing for the "connected home" - if only my personal home server would be a silent machine (why is ther alway heat where there is power?).
Nevertheless, this defintivly will make it on my multimedia-information-and-everything-server software list - I then only will have to change the HTML-Template as described at the VLC Documatation Page.