raylib + libvlc: play videos in raylib

A minimal C example that plays videos inside a raylib window using libvlc: every format VLC can open (mp4, mkv, webm, avi, ...), network streams and webcams, rendered to a raylib texture. Works on Linux, macOS and Windows.

I bet you have been trying to render and control a video with raylib for a long long time. Don't you think you should at least buy me a beer?

Features

• Many videos at once, each one draggable, with play/pause, restart and seek
• Drag & drop files on the window, or pass them on the command line
• Streams and webcams too (see the comment in main.c)
• Single C file, no engine or framework

How it works

libvlc decodes the video on its own threads and writes each frame, already scaled, into a memory buffer through libvlc_video_set_callbacks(). Frames are triple buffered: the main thread picks the latest one and uploads it with UpdateTexture(), holding the lock only to swap pointers.

How to build

• Install raylib 4.2 or newer. Build instructions here.
• Install libvlc 3.x and glib. On debian/ubuntu/etc.: sudo apt-get install libvlc-dev libglib2.0-dev
• Run make

macOS

With Homebrew. libvlc comes with VLC.app:

brew install pkg-config raylib glib
brew install --cask vlc
make

If VLC.app is not in /Applications, use make VLC_DIR=/path/to/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS.

libvlc must be told where VLC.app keeps its plugins:

export VLC_PLUGIN_PATH=/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins

Windows

Use MSYS2. From the UCRT64 shell:

pacman -S make mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-{gcc,pkgconf,raylib,glib2,vlc}
make

How to use

• Drop one or more videos on the window, or pass them on the command line.
• Drag a video to move it, click on its bar to seek.
• SPACE play/pause, R restart, C close the video on top.

D version

The same example written in D is in d/. It uses the C headers directly through ImportC, with no bindings to write or install.

cd d
dub build
./raylib-libvlc-example

Screenshots from CI

Taken by the automated build tests: on every push the build workflow builds the example on each OS, plays two test videos and captures the screen.

Linux	macOS	Windows

The test videos are clips from Big Buck Bunny, (c) Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.

See also

• raylib-ffmpeg-video: the same with ffmpeg