dart_vlc

Flutter audio/video playback, broadcast & recording library for Windows & Linux.

🎉 News

I have recently started to work on a better, stable & more performant media playback library with hardware accelerated video rendering library for Flutter Windows & Linux. Other than just hardware-accelerated video embedding, it has things like pitch shifting support, tag/metadata reader, dynamic playlist support, native OS controls on Windows/Linux & volume boost feature out-of-the-box along side basic features. Currently, audio-only support is 100% ready & used in production inside Harmonoid: A Material Design-led music player to play & manage music library, video support needs to be written (although POC video is attached below).

It has very little expense on GPU & CPU during video playback (compared to package:dart_vlc). See the video for more details:

Since, I have no personal requirements for video support, I need sponsor / funding to continue my work. 💌 Trust me, it's a very tedious process with very-little clear direction. Your support can ensure timely maintenance & stability of library that you can depend upon.

You may sponsor my work on my GitHub Sponsors profile & get updates/early-access.

Video support for Windows will be implemented with Direct3D-OpenGL interop with the help of ANGLE, since libmpv has a performant OpenGL API. More details about initial setup my be found on my following repositories:

• OpenGL-Direct3D interop with ANGLE.
• package:media_engine with complete audio playback API (leftover support for video rendering).

If enough support is received, I may even add support to the official package:video_player, give you personal support & help.

libmpv+flutter.mp4

dart_vlc

Installation

pub.dev

dependencies:
  ...
  dart_vlc: ^0.1.9

GitHub

dependencies:
  dart_vlc:
    git:
      url: https://github.com/alexmercerind/dart_vlc.git
      ref: master

dependency_overrides:
  dart_vlc_ffi:
    git:
      url: https://github.com/alexmercerind/dart_vlc.git
      ref: master
      path: ffi

Feel free to open a new issue or discussion, if you found a bug or need assistance.

Support

Consider supporting the project by buying me a coffee or starring the repository.

Thanks a lot for your support.

macOS support has been removed due to lack of maintainers & not having macOS running hardware.

Documentation

Checkout Setup section to configure plugin on your platform.

Initialize the library

Future<void> main() async {
  await DartVLC.initialize();
  runApp(MyApp());
}

Create a new player instance.

final player = Player(id: 69420);

For passing VLC CLI arguments, use commandlineArguments argument.

final player = Player(
  id: 69420,
  commandlineArguments: ['--no-video']
);

Create a media for playback.

final media0 = Media.file(
  File('C:/music.mp3')
);

final media1 = Media.asset(
  'assets/audio/example.mp3'
);

final media2 = Media.network(
  'https://www.example.com/music.aac'
);

// Clip the media.
final media2 = Media.network(
  'https://www.example.com/music.aac',
  startTime: Duration(seconds: 20), // Start media from 20 seconds from the beginning.
  stopTime: Duration(seconds: 60), // End media at 60 seconds from the beginning.
);

Create a list of medias using playlist.

final playlist = Playlist(
  medias: [
    Media.file(File('C:/music.mp3')),
    Media.file(File('C:/audio.mp3')),
    Media.asset('assets/audio/example.mp3'),
    Media.network('https://www.example.com/music.aac'),
  ],
);

Open a media or playlist into a player.

player.open(
  Media.file(File('C:/music0.mp3')),
  autoStart: true, // default
);

player.open(
  Playlist(
    medias: [
      Media.file(File('C:/music0.mp3')),
      Media.file(File('C:/music1.mp3')),
      Media.file(File('C:/music2.mp3')),
    ],
  ),
  autoStart: false,
);

Control playback.

player.play();

player.seek(Duration(seconds: 30));

player.pause();

player.playOrPause();

player.stop();

Controls the playlist.

player.next();

player.previous();

player.jumpToIndex(10);

Manipulate an already playing playlist.

player.add(
  Media.file(File('C:/music0.mp3')),
);

player.remove(4);

player.insert(
  2,
  Media.file(File('C:/music0.mp3')),
);

player.move(0, 4);

Set playback volume & rate.

player.setVolume(0.5);

player.setRate(1.25);

Get & change playback device.

List<Device> devices = Devices.all;

player.setDevice(
  devices[0],
);

Save the video screenshot

player.takeSnapshot(file, 1920, 1080);

Show the video inside widget tree.

Show Video in the Widget tree.

NOTE: This will cause additional CPU-load due to conversion of video frames to RGBA/BGRA pixel-buffers & Texture interop. For better performance, use NativeVideo instead.

class _MyAppState extends State<MyApp> {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      body: Video(
        player: player,
        height: 1920.0,
        width: 1080.0,
        scale: 1.0, // default
        showControls: false, // default
      ),
    );
  }
}

By default, Video widget's frame size will adapt to the currently playing video. To override this & define custom video frame size, pass videoDimensions argument while instanciating Player class as follows.

Player player = Player(
  id: 69420,
  videoDimensions: const VideoDimensions(640, 360),
);

NativeVideo

A more performant Widget for showing video inside the Widget tree.

This Widget is more performant compared to Video & uses flutter_native_view to embed the video output directly without any texture interop or pixel-buffer copy calls.

But, it is highly dependent on platform & other limitations apply. In general, this widget is more performant & should be used if possible.

1. Edit your windows/runner/main.cpp as required here.

2. Register the plugin with useFlutterNativeView as true.

void main() {
  DartVLC.initilize(useFlutterNativeView: true);
  runApp(MyApp());
}

3. Pass registerTexture as false when creating Player & use NativeVideo widget.

class _MyAppState extends State<MyApp> {
  Player player = Player(id: 0, registerTexture: false);

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      body: Center(
        child: NativeVideo(
          player: player,
          height: 420.0,
          width: 320.0
        ),
      ),
    );
  }
}

Change user agent

player.setUserAgent(userAgent);

Retrieve metadata of media.

Media media = Media.network(
  'https://www.example.com/media.mp3',
  parse: true,
  timeout: Duration(seconds: 10),
);

Map<String, String> metas = media.metas;

Listen to playback events.

(Same can be retrieved directly from Player instance without having to rely on stream).

Listen to currently loaded media & playlist index changes.

player.currentStream.listen((CurrentState state) {
  state.index;
  state.media;
  state.medias;
  state.isPlaylist;
});

Listen to playback position & media duration.

player.positionStream.listen((PositionState state) {
  state.position;
  state.duration;
});

Listen to playback states.

player.playbackStream.listen((PlaybackState state) {
  state.isPlaying;
  state.isSeekable;
  state.isCompleted;
});

Listen to volume & rate of the Player.

player.generalStream.listen((GeneralState state) {
  state.volume;
  state.rate;
});

Listen to dimensions of currently playing Video.

player.videoDimensionsStream.listen((VideoDimensions video) {
  video.width;
  video.height;
});

Listen to buffering progress of the playing Media.

player.bufferingProgressStream.listen(
  (double event) {
    this.setState(() {
      this.bufferingProgress = event;
    });
  },
);

Set an equalizer.

Create using preset.

Equalizer equalizer = Equalizer.createMode(EqualizerMode.party);
player.setEqualizer(equalizer);

Create custom equalizer.

Equalizer equalizer = Equalizer.createEmpty();
equalizer.setPreAmp(10.0);
equalizer.setBandAmp(31.25, -10.0);
equalizer.setBandAmp(100.0, -10.0);
player.setEqualizer(equalizer);

Get equalizer state.

equalizer.preAmp;
equalizer.bandAmps;

Broadcast a media.

Broadcasting to localhost.

final broadcast = Broadcast.create(
  id: 0,
  media: Media.file(File('C:/video.mp4')),
  configuration: BroadcastConfiguration(
    access: 'http',
    mux: 'mpeg1',
    dst: '127.0.0.1:8080',
    vcodec: 'mp1v',
    vb: 1024,
    acodec: 'mpga',
    ab: 128,
  ),
);
broadcast.start();

Dispose the Broadcast instance to release resources.

broadcast.dispose();

Record a media.

final record = Record.create(
  id: 205,
  media: Media.network('https://www.example.com/streaming-media.MP3'),
  pathFile: '/home/alexmercerind/recording.MP3',
);
record.start();

Setup

Windows

Everything is already set up.

Linux

For using this plugin on Linux, you must have VLC & libVLC installed.

On Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install vlc

sudo apt-get install libvlc-dev

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

sudo dnf install vlc

sudo dnf install vlc-devel

Acknowledgements

• BIG thanks to @jnschulze for his awesome contributions to this project & to the Flutter engine itself like adding texture support & adding macOS support here. I have learnt a lot about modern C++ & good-practices when writing code from you, thanks a lot for your guidances, reviews, work & donation. I'm really really thankful to you.

• BIG thanks to @DomingoMG for adding Record and Chromecast classes. Also, thanks a lot for donation to the project & giving me motivation to start building this. I would've never attempted this if you didn't motivate me. And now that it started, dart_vlc has grown a lot.

• Thanks to @tomassasovsky for adding visual controls to Video widget.

• Thanks to following members of libVLC community (irrespective of the order) for giving general ideas about libVLC APIs:

  • @jeremyVignelles
  • @chouquette
  • @mfkl
  • @caprica

• Finally, thanks to the VideoLAN team for creating libVLC & libVLC++. Really great guys really great at their work.

Contributions

The code in the project is nicely arranged and follows the clean architecture.

Contributions to the project are open, it will be appreciated if you discuss the bug-fix/feature-addition in the issues first.

License

Copyright (C) 2021, Hitesh Kumar Saini [email protected].

This library & work under this repository is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.

Vision

There aren't any media (audio or video) playback libraries for Flutter or Dart on Windows/Linux yet. So, this project is all about that. As one might be already aware, VLC is one of the best media playback tools out there.

So, now you can use it to play audio or video files from Flutter or Dart apps.

As the project has grown, awesome people from community have added support for iOS & macOS aswell.

Example

You can see an example project here.

dart_vlc running on Ubuntu Linux.

Features

Done

• Media playback from File.
• Media playback from network.
• Media playback from assets.
• play/pause/playOrPause/stop.
• Multiple Player instances.
• Playlist.
• next/back/jump for playlists.
• setVolume.
• setRate.
• seek.
• Event streams.
• add/insert/remove/move Media inside Playlist during playback with no interruption.
• Device enumeration & changing.
• Retrieving metadata/tags of a Media.
• Embedding Video inside the Flutter window (using texture or natively).
• Supporting live streaming links.
• Broadcast class for broadcasting Media.
• Record class for recording Media.
• Chromecast class.
• Equalizer configuration & presets.
• Changing user agent.
• Changing Video's frame size according to video.
• Saving screenshot of the video.
• Changing/retrieving audio track.
• Media clipping.
• Support for Windows, Linux or macOS.

Under progress or planned features (irrespective of order)...

• Bringing project on Android and iOS.
• Removing libVLC++ dependency.
• Subtitle control.