playing multiple videos with libvlcsharp on multiple monitors

Question

So i'm having a quite simple problem which doesnt seem to be trivial to solve. I found LibVLCSharp for controlling my videos from my c# program, which is exactly what i wanted. But i find the documentation to be quite complicated or non-existant.

I want to accomplish playing up to 4 different videos on 4 installed Monitors on one windows machine. I had a working example for 2 monitors right here:

    string[] vlcParameter1 = new string[]
    {
        @"--video-x=-1024",
        @"--video-y=1",
        @"--video-on-top",
        @"--fullscreen",
        @"--no-one-instance"
    };

    string[] vlcParameter2 = new string[]
    {
        @"--video-x=1",
        @"--video-y=1",
        @"--video-on-top",
        @"--fullscreen",
        @"--no-one-instance"
    };

    using var libvlc1 = new LibVLC(enableDebugLogs: true, vlcParameter1);
    using var libvlc2 = new LibVLC(enableDebugLogs: true, vlcParameter2);

    using var media1 = new Media(libvlc1, new Uri(@"C:\sample.mp4"));
    using var media2 = new Media(libvlc1, new Uri(@"C:\sample.mp4"));

    using var mediaplayer1 = new MediaPlayer(media1);
    using var mediaplayer2 = new MediaPlayer(media2);

    mediaplayer1.Fullscreen = false;
    mediaplayer2.Fullscreen = false;

    mediaplayer1.Play();
    mediaplayer2.Play();

Thats pretty simple but the FAQ from the libvlcsharp github page says to NEVER instanciate more than one LibVLC object. Which i'm doing there. Its working fine but i dont know about the problems.

To avoid this, i tried to use the Media.AddOption like this:

    media1.AddOption(":video-x=-1024");
    media1.AddOption(":video-y=1");

But that didnt work either. Is there another simple way to display multiple videos on multiple screens?

Answer 1

LibVLC instances may have shared states in the core of the library that may impact you depending on your use cases. It's not recommended, but if all works fine for you, then keep at it.

I'd personally handle the video view location myself instead of using video-x.