How to activate the VLC web interface

VLC web interface

VLC is a multimedia player with many possibilities. A very interesting one is the possibility of controlling the application from other computers through its web interface.

VLC web interface

La VLC web interface allows us to control the media player remotely from another machine, either in our local network or Traves de Internet. This interface is very complete and has both basic options (playback controls, volume) and advanced (audio synchronization, equalizer, media manager).

How to activate it

Activating the VLC web interface is very simple, just open the program preferences (Ctrl+P) and go to the "All" section:

VLC Advanced Preferences

Then we navigate to Interface → Main interfaces and we select «Web»:

VLC Interfaces

We save the changes. Now it is possible to access the interface from localhost: 8080, however if we enter directly with the IP of the computer on which VLC is running, it will return an access error. To remedy this we have to edit the ".hosts" file located in the path:

/usr/share/vlc/lua/http/

Editing the ".hosts" file

Editing can be done with our favorite text editor, executing for example:

kdesudo kate /usr/share/vlc/lua/http/.hosts

O well:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/vlc/lua/http/.hosts

Once we have the document open, we simply add the Private IP of the computer to which we want to grant access; we can also uncomment the IP range relevant in the "# private addresses" section.

A more aggressive option is to uncomment the "# the world" section, however it is not exactly a safe measure.

Once we have made the necessary changes we save the document and later we restart VLC to take effect. Once this is done we will finally be able to access it from other machines on our network.

More information - VLC 2.0.7 released; installation on Ubuntu 13.04, VLC: Play YouTube videos in their highest quality when using playlists


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  1.   moral381 said

    I can't listen to the station from the office pc, apparently due to proxy issues they have blocked streaming, I know that from the VLC you can listen to stations if you have the URL, I already have it but when I add it I get:
    «Your entrance cannot be opened:
    VLC is unable to open the MRL "http://3653.live.streamtheworld.com/BLURADIO_SC". See the log for more details. »

    Help me please
    Thank you