possible to stream with vlc?

[Dedsec1]

Hey,

first off, good job on this tool!, plus i love the fact its cross platform which makes it even better for people to use. so whenever i try to use ‪C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe in the stream command. i see the tool saying streaming for about five seconds then finishes. but overall great tool and keep up the great work with this 👍

[mmozeiko]

Yes, it is possible. I have tried couple videos I have in VLC and it works fine.
For VLC you need to enter following command as stream command in preferences:

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" -

Quotes are important, because path contains space. And - at the end means to read data from stdin which rclone will be providing.

You can check if streaming works with your setup by executing following command in commandline (cmd.exe):

rclone cat remote-name:"/path/to/media.mp4" | "C:\path\to\vlc.exe" - 

If this works, then streaming should work also in my GUI. If it doesn't work, then something else is bad (maybe format of file is not friendly to streaming or something like that).

[Dedsec1]

so i just tested it from cli and it works just fine, but when i right click and hit stream, vlc opens but wont stream the file right away in vlc.

[mmozeiko]

When you say "wont stream the file right away in vlc" - do you mean it starts after some time? Or it doesn't start at all? Or your initial statement - that GUI says stream finished after ~5 seconds and nothing shows up in VLC?

[AggelosM]

It works but I can't skip to a certain time. Only pause and play.

[mmozeiko]

This is expected behavior. That's how rclone works - it simply receives file byte by byte from cloud and passes this information to player. If player wants to seek, it has no way to tell this to rclone. So you can watch videos from beginning to end without seeking, only pausing.

If you want to have seeking support, you need to mount remote folder. This is currently possible only on macOS, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

[AggelosM]

Thanks for the answer! I though so because it works when I mount it on a Linux platform.
I guess it's not in the plans to implement the mount function on Windows right? (Yeah, I know it's an extremely complicated issue :P )

Anyways you've done a very good GUI, it's very useful thank you :)

[mmozeiko]

There is nothing extra planned to implement in GUI, except make mount button visible which would call rclone.exe to do actual mounting. But there are things happening in rclone itself to support mounting, read here: andrewiankidd/rcloneExplorer#21

[duczz]

is it normal that i can not fast-forward a video?

[mmozeiko]

Yes, this is expected. rclone reads data sequentially from remote and passes it to media player. Player application has no way to communicate anything back to rclone to seek forward or backwards, so all it can do is just play media file sequentially (or pause).

[AndyIbanez]

What is the right way to do this on Mac?

I wrote the vlc's executable path (which I got with the which command), but it only opens VLC without the URL to stream.

/usr/local/bin/vlc

[mmozeiko]

@AndyIbanez did you add - at the end? - as argument to vlc informs it to read media data from stdin, which is where rclone will pass the data.

[sscotth]

I installed VLC on macOS via Homebrew Cask and am using this stream command to get VLC to work:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -

Fast-forward isn't working.

[caspertone2003]

I was experiencing VLC not working stating:

"Your input can't be opened
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'fd://0'. Check the log for details."

working ok in two machines, no go on the other. Same versions of OS, rclone, rclonebrowser, vlc....

"the" solution was installing java in the machine where it was not working.

The idea came reading caprica/vlcj#601

So, looks that RCloneBrowser or VLC NEEDS java installed for streaming to work... if it is RcloneBrowser, perhaps should be indicated in the readme....

Thanks!

[mmozeiko]

Sounds like issue with OSX and SIP, not java installation. rclone or RcloneBrowser DOES NOT need java. And afaik VLC also DOES NOT need java.