One of cool features VLC provides is the ability to remote control, specifically, via telnet. You might wonder what is the use of telnet relating to VLC, I mean purpose?
Okay, each time you want to stream an input, you might often think of creating a new VLC instance to stream, for example,
$ vlc INPUT0 --sout OUTPUT0
$ vlc INPUT1 --sout OUTPUT1
Well then, to manage this list of VLC instances, you need to keep a hold on all VLC instances’ process IDs and that’s quite a pain to live with.
That’s where telnet is useful. Actually, telnet is just an interface which helps to interact with VLM (VideoLAN manager).
To enable the VLC telnet interface, simply start VLC with following options,
$ vlc -I telnet --telnet-password=secret --telnet-port=9999
the parameter --telnet-password is to set password for telnet server and is required,
the parameter --telnet-port is to set telnet server port, which default to 4212.
To connect to VLC telnet server,
$ telnet localhost 9999
Prompt the password and you’re set to go with VLM.
In case you want to provide VOD (Video On Demand), you need to provide RTSP server information,
$ vlc -I telnet --telnet-password=secret --telnet-port=9999 --rtsp-host=127.0.0.1 --rtsp-port=9000
Have fun 🙂
