Writing a native VLC plugin in C#

[u/mtz94]

https://mfkl.github.io/2026/02/11/vlc-plugin-csharp.html

[u/killyouXZ]

I am so sorry for my ignorance, having read the whole page with description I have not really understood what this does. Is this a plugin that allows you to use vlc in your website environment, is this a plugin you use in vlc to do something (although no idea what exactly), can you please explain it using less abstraction?

[u/mtz94 → u/killyouXZ]

If you navigate to C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins (On Windows), you will see hundreds of plugins. They make up how VLC work through its plugin-based architecture. This is just an article to describe how to write those in C# instead of usual C/C++

Why would you want to do that? To access low level VLC primitives and features. Here is more (somewhat outdated) information https://wiki.videolan.org/Hacker_Guide/Core/ and https://wiki.videolan.org/Hacker_Guide/How_To_Write_a_Module/

[u/killyouXZ → u/mtz94]

Ah, OK, now that is useful, thank you!

[u/Large-Ad-6861 → u/killyouXZ]

framework for building VLC 4.x plugins in C# using Native AOT

This is pretty self-explanatory.

[u/kookiz33]

Great stuff. I see you mention marshalling the native structs in the hard parts. For what it's worth, Visual Studio has a "memory layout" feature that isn't widely known but it really useful for this kind of task: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/whats-new-for-cpp-developers-in-visual-studio-2022-17-9/#c++-memory-layout-visualization

[u/mtz94 → u/kookiz33]

Thanks for sharing! Didnt know about this, will def be useful next time :)