You are here: Introduction

VLC4OSGI

VLC4OSGI is an OSGi application that provides a service for playing multimedia files. VLC4OSGi is based on the VLC player. It offers a multithreaded player generator that creates player instances on demand. Currently VLC4OSGi only works under a Linux x86 machine with glibc 2.4 or newer. A Windows version will be released in the near future.

VLC4OSGi has been developed at the Departamento de Ingeniería Telemáica (DIT) of the Universidad Politénica de Madrid (UPM), Spain.


License

VLC4OSGI is an Open Source project licensed under de GPL license. So, its source code is freely available to anybody. You can download it at OS4OS.

Crash Course

VLC4OSGi in two steps:
1. Get a reference to the player generator.
2. Create a player with a URL to the mutimedia file and some parameters.
You will obtain a player instance, with control interfaces and a visual component wrapped in an AWT Canvas object.

PlayerGenerator vlcgenerator;
ServiceReference[] refs;
refs = Activator.getContext().getServiceReferences(
	PlayerGenerator.class.getName(),
	"(player_type=vlc)");
if (refs != null) {
	vlcgenerator =
		(PlayerGenerator) Activator.getContext().getService(refs[0]);
}
                    

This is a snippet to create a player and control it:

COBRAPlayer vlcplayer = vlcgenerator.createPlayer(url, args);
Canvas playercanvas = (Canvas) vlcplayer.getUIComponent();
playercanvas.setSize(200, 200);
Panel panel = new Panel();
panel.add((Canvas) playercanvas);
panel.validate();
vlcplayer.start();

...

vlcplayer.stop();
                    

Sample Bundle

To learn the use and test the capabilities of VLC4OSGi you can download a sample bundle (with source files included inside) called es.upm.dit.multimedia.piplayer.vlc4osgi.test wich opens a folder specified by the user and creates a small canvas for each file in the folder in wich it can be played if it's a multimedia file. But don't expect a full fleged player, it's just an example bundle.

Forge Site

To access the forums, mailing lists or simply to obtain more information go to the Forge site clicking here.


Documentation

To learn more on VLC4OSGI browse the Javadoc documentation page, accesible from the left menu of this webpage.

Forge Site

To access the forums, mailing lists or simply to obtain more information go to the Forge site clicking here.


Acknowledgements

TorreOn development has been partially supported by the ITEA Passepartout project

Latest news

January 12, 2007:
First draft for the webpage.

March 21, 2007:
Updated to the new version of VLC4OSGi.