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VLC: The HTTP interface (macros and RPN evaluator)
- wyday 17y agoSeriously? Documentation on the front page of Hacker News? This is some dry stuff. I guess I should just be thankful it's not yet another review of the Go language.
- bensummers 17y agoIt's the hackyness of what's documented. Embed a Turing complete language in HTML, then run it when the page is requested from an embedded HTTP server. What's not to love? It's either a stroke of genius or an amusingly inappropriate implementation of an embedded scripting language.
- some1else 17y agoNice! Want <video>! :-)
- ivenkys 17y agoThe HTTP interface on VLC is not new - what would be interesting is to find the reasons for them doing it this way. As a product VLC is really good.
- bensummers 17y agoMaybe because everything speaks HTTP, so it's a good protocol for doing remote control? Or you could build a custom controller interface trivially, which could be accessed from a remote control (iPod touch?) on your local network?
- mseebach 17y agoWhy would someone want to re-invent ColdFusion 1.0, only 15 years late? If they'd invented a smooth and tight DSL for doing video control, I'd be impressed, but this has the feel of someone getting excited about RPN and looking for a way to crowbar it into the product. Something relevant (and really cool!) for VLC to do with a build-in web-server would be one-click serving of a H.264 stream directly in a player (sniffing for a HTML5 video-tag, otherwise serving a flash-player). But no, we get RPN and a syntax that'd make a 1999 ASP developer cringe. For the record: VLC is amazing, and one of my first installs on pretty much any computer. I routinely stick it on friends' Windows machines, only to hear them rave about it a few weeks later, because they never have to troll around for codecs.