VLC (VideoLan Client) is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocol. It can also act as a video on demand broadcaster.

While it has had an external control mechanism for a number of years, it has never been what could be called Delphi friendly. That fortunately has changed with the advent of not one but two open source delphi translations of the C header to use LibVLC in your application, plus some useful helper objects. LibVLC is the main dll which contains all the decoders and associated components to create a mulitimedia player without the need for COM or ActiveX.

VLC is available from the Video LAN website www.videolan.org.

The two delphi / pascal interfaces are:-

1) delphivlc, hosted on google code at http://code.google.com/p/delphivlc/

2) paslibvlc, hosted on sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/paslibvlc/

I have succesfully used the paslibvlc project with VLC 1.1.11 using Delphi XE on a Win7 platform.

8 Responses

  1. Interesting. Currently I got an application which uses dspack, which if suboptimal as users have to install codecs themselves. I am not familiar with either of the two, so why did you pick paslibvlc over delphivlc?

  2. Is there a chance to use the interfaces in Delphi XE2 for cross-platform firemonkey development?

  3. vlc the client must be installed ??
    cause when i just copy LibVLC.dll into exe folder it says libvlccore.dll required.
    i tried also copying all dlls from vlc to exe folder, still dont work..
    ps : i use vlc 2.0.3

    1. The LibVLC is the core dll and does load other dlls. You need to install the vlc client to ensure all dependant dlls are loaded.