This file documents the bindings generator, not the bindings themselves. For the bindings documentation, see the README.module file.

The bindings generator generates ctypes-bindings from the include files defining the public API. The same generated module should be compatible with various versions of libvlc 2.* and 3.*. However, there may be incompatible changes between major versions. Versioned bindings for 2.2 and 3.0 are provided in the repository.

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

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

The code expects to be placed inside a VLC source tree, in vlc/bindings/python, so that it finds the development include files, or to find the installed include files in /usr/include (on Debian, install libvlc-dev).

To generate the vlc.py module and its documentation, for both the development version and the installed VLC version, use

make

If you want to generate the bindings from an installed version of the VLC includes (which are expected to be in /usr/include/vlc), use the 'installed' target:

make installed

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 <https://olivieraubert.net/vlc/python-ctypes/>

The generated module version number is built from the VLC version number and the generator version number:

vlc_major.vlc_minor.(1000 * vlc_micro + 100 * generator_major + generator_minor)

so that it shared it major.minor with the corresponding VLC.

To generate the reference PyPI module (including setup.py, examples and metadata files), use

make dist

There are short-terms contributions (reporting and fixing bugs, contributing unit tests, contributing examples). A number of libvlc functions are currently blacklisted (search for _blacklist in the generator code), mostly because of their signature complexity. They would benefit some work.

Longer terms goals include the rewriting of the generator to use a proper parser for the C-syntax (for the moment, the parser relies on regexp-based expression, which works thanks to the coding style applied in the code, but remains very fragile).