Welcome to python-vlc’s documentation!

You are looking at the new python-vlc API documentation. Note that there are still some shortcomings (for instance, Enum values are not provided). If you feel like contributions sphinx/sphinx-autoapi changes to improve this documentation, please do, and submit a pull request!

Python ctypes-based bindings for libvlc

The bindings use ctypes to directly call the libvlc dynamic lib, and the code is generated from the include files defining the public API. The same module should be compatible with various versions of libvlc 3.*. However, there may be incompatible changes between major versions.

Installing the module

You can install the module through PyPI:

pip install python-vlc

Using the module

The module offers two ways of accessing the API - a raw access to all exported methods, and more convenient wrapper classes. The API documentation is on Readthedocs.

Using wrapper classes

Most major structures of the libvlc API (Instance, Media, MediaPlayer, etc) are wrapped as classes, with shorter method names and some adaptations to provide a more pythonic API:

>>> import vlc
>>> player = vlc.MediaPlayer('file:///tmp/foo.avi')
>>> player.play()
>>> player.get_instance() # returns the corresponding instance

In this case, a default vlc.Instance will be instanciated and stored in vlc._default_instance. It will be used to instanciate the various classes (Media, MediaList, MediaPlayer, etc).

You also can use wrapper methods closer to the original libvlc API:

>>> import vlc
>>> instance = vlc.Instance('--no-audio', '--fullscreen')
>>> player = instance.media_player_new()
>>> player.audio_get_volume()
50
>>> media = instance.media_new('file:///tmp/foo.avi')
>>> media.get_mrl()
'file:///tmp/foo.avi'
>>> player.set_media(m)
>>> player.play()

Using raw access

Libvlc methods are available as attributes of the vlc module (as vlc.libvlc_*). Use their docstring (any introspective shell like ipython is your friend) to explore them, or refer to the online documentation at https://olivieraubert.net/vlc/python-ctypes/

>>> import vlc
>>> vlc.libvlc_get_version()
'3.0.0-rc2 Vetinari'
>>> exc = vlc.VLCException()
>>> instance = vlc.libvlc_new(0, [], exc)
>>> instance
<vlc.Instance object at 0x8384a4c>
>>> vlc.libvlc_audio_get_volume(instance, exc)
50

Example code

You can find example files in the repository.

Note that the vlc.py module can itself be invoked as an application using its own features, which also serves as a API usage example. See the end of the module after the line if __name__ == "__main__":

License

The generated module is licensed, like libvlc, under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1 or later.

Documentation