VLC commandline options

rafaellerm

I really don't know whether this is a feature request or a bug report.

I have recently had a probably hardware-related problem with VLC: the video played on the main screen and not in the second (the projector). I know that this is not OpenLP-related since it happened also with standalone VLC. 

However, I could manage to make standalone VLC work by changing its settings (disabling overlay, could be also done by '--no-overlay' by what I understand). Of course I could not reproduce this in OpenLP. Also, when I try to play a video in OpenLP, Windows 7 changes to 'Classic color scheme' --- from the VLC docs, this means that it is choosing the wrong output settings (automatically, I looked at OpenLP code and checked that this is not OpenLP's fault). There is a way to force the right output driver by commandline options.

It is probably evident where I am trying to get at: these commandline options would need to be passed by OpenLP code, where the options are now hardcoded. Of course this could be done in various ways, from modifying the configuration UI to simply reading a text file from the data folder. IMO having an option of tweaking VLC options would open new troubleshooting capabilities to weird corner cases.

dyoung

We have a similar problem with VLC, we are running Windows and videos work through OpenLP& VLC but there is a v-sync issue in that the video breaks up horizontally into 2 halves with the top half a frame ahead. We can fix it in VLC by changing the output renderer to a different setting (can't remember which off the top of my head) and it works fine.

It would be really great if OpenLP exposed the options in VLC as options through the GUI, but that is a big job to implement as there are lots of options in VLC. A good alternative as mentioned above would be to allow the user to enter command line arguments in the settings page and pass them to VLC.

Thanks!

rafaellerm

Good to know that I am not the only one who would appreciate this functionality. I was unsure as there was not much mention of these kind of issues in the forum.

Although I don't have much time to contribute in a larger scale, I have a medium to good skill in Python and certainly would be able to do the simple, file-based alternative. I know this isn't exactly a paramount of usability, but it is really an enabler. Plus, anyone who knows what a commandline argument is should be OK with editing a text file.

So, I ask a second question to the devs: would a merge request implementing this feature be accepted?

raoul

No merge proposals are turned down without a decent review and valid reason. Almost all merge proposals are accepted, though some require more work to get into trunk :-)