

VLC: The HTTP interface (macros and RPN evaluator) - bensummers
http://www.videolan.org/doc/vlc-user-guide/en/ch05.html

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mseebach
Why 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.

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ivenkys
The 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.

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bensummers
Maybe 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?

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wyday
Seriously? 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
It'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.

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some1else
Nice! Want <video>! :-)

