Control VLC with Phone

More Comfort

We all like VLC. But also we are not satisfied with the existing new features for a long time, we want a different experience as well.

In these days of growing need of comfort, we want more.

Let’s see an experience.

You are watching a film on laptop. But the screen isn’t wide enough. You think of connecting it with HDMI cable to Television.

Yeah. Cool. Seems great.

But. Happiness doesn’t last long.

You get a call on your phone and need to pause the movie.

Well. Pain.

Get-up, Walk-there, Press-pause, Take-call, Press-play, Walk-back.

Hope no new call.

Let’s now control VLC with your phone and enjoy the experience.

• Setting with VLC on laptop

1. Open VLC
2. Navigate : Tools>Preferences : A pop-pp window opens.
3. In the pop-up windows, in bottom-left select All in Show settings .
4. On left-pane, click on Main interfaces under Interfaces category.
5. Make sure Web checkbox is checked.
6. Un-collapse Main interfaces and click on Lua.
7. Under Lua HTTP>Password, type any password.
8. Click save.

• Checking settings

1. On browser access http://localhost:8080/
2. If asked for username and password, leave username blank and enter password that you did set-up before. If everything is right yo will see VLC interface on your browser.

If you do not see a interface check if your 8080 port is in use by another app. I’m a software person, so mostly my Jenkins runs on it. You check yours.

Now VLC will allow this interface access from your own machine. To allow access to other machines(like phone) you need to allow them.

• Allowing connection

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\http
2. Check if a “.hosts” file is present. If not then create one.
3. Now add WLAN_IP_address of your phone in this host file.

Mind that your phone is on same network(Mostly on same Wifi)

You can add specific IP address of phone, or if you want you can provide access to bunch of devices by adding WLAN_IP_address of all devices you want to give access to. Use can also use a CIDER-BLOCK notation for this purpose. (Ignore is you don’t understand CIDER-BLOCK, not required).

• Now on phone

1. Install “VLC Mobile Remote, PC Remote & Mac Remote” app from Playstore.
2. Open app. Click on ADD MANUALLY in the bottom-right.
3. Type IP address of your laptop. It will be something like 192.168.something.something or 172.something.something.something

You can get IP address of your laptop by typing ipconfig in command prompt.

4. Type password as you did set-up before.

5. Click Save.

6. Click on AUTO CONNECT.

Good Luck.Now you can access your Laptop files from phone and play it on VLC on laptop.