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 is compatible with various versions of libvlc 2.*.

The generated module is licensed, like libvlc, under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1 or later. The module generator itself is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

You can get the latest version of the code generator from <https://github.com/oaubert/python-vlc/> or <http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc/bindings/python.git>.

To generate the vlc.py module and its documentation, make sure you have the libvlc headers in your systems and use

make

To install it for development purposes (add a symlink to your Python library) simply do

python setup.py develop

preferably inside a virtualenv. You can uninstall it later with

python setup.py develop --uninstall

Documentation building needs epydoc. An online build is available at <http://olivieraubert.net/vlc/python-ctypes/>

The module offers two ways of accessing the API - a raw access to all exported methods, and more convenient wrapper classes :

• Raw access: methods are available as attributes of the vlc module. Use their docstring (any introspective shell like ipython is your friends) to explore them.
• Wrapper classes: most major structures of the libvlc API (Instance, Media, MediaPlayer, etc) are wrapped as classes, with shorter method names.

On win32, the simplest way is to put the vlc.py file in the same directory as the libvlc.dll file (standard location: c:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC).

• Using raw access:

  >>> import vlc
  >>> vlc.libvlc_get_version()
  '1.0.0 Goldeneye'
  >>> e=vlc.VLCException()
  >>> i=vlc.libvlc_new(0, [], e)
  >>> i
  <vlc.Instance object at 0x8384a4c>
  >>> vlc.libvlc_audio_get_volume(i,e)
  50

• Using wrapper classes:

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

or shorter:

>>> import vlc
>>> p=vlc.MediaPlayer('file:///tmp/foo.avi')
>>> p.play()

In this latter 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).