[Live-devel] [vlc-devel] Re: [vlc] Illegal characters in RTSP stream user/password mechanism

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

On 6-aug-2005, at 8:09, Ross Finlayson wrote:
>> It seems that when there is an illegal character in the user/password
>> authentication mechanism of an RTSP URL, then VLC fails to deliver
>> the content.
>>
>> For example, for user "user" and password "passw at rd" the RTSP URL
>> is: rtsp://user:passw@rd@somesite/somecatalog/file.rm and that's
>> something that causes VideoLAN not to show the stream.
>
> The problem here is caused by the RTSP client code's parsing of  
> optional "<user>:<password>@" fields in "rtsp://" URLs (in the  
> LIVE.COM libraries).  It stops at the first '@' (or '/').
>
> Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any good way to fix this,  
> because of the fact that the '@', '/' and '.' characters can also  
> appear in the stream name portion of the URL (i.e., after the host  
> name or address).  I don't believe that this can be parsed  
> unambiguously.  Basically, "<username>:password@" is a non-standard  
> hack, and one that we shouldn't really be using in any case.
>
> The real solution to this problem is to fix VLC so that - if a RTSP  
> (or HTTP!) authentication failure occurs - it will then pop up a  
> dialog box in wihch users can enter a <username>,<password> pair.   
> Then, retry using that <username> and <password>.
>
> This is what QuickTime Player and other media players do; VLC  
> should be doing it as well.
>
> If the VLC developers would implement such a dialog box, and use it  
> for HTTP authentication, then I'll add the appropriate code to the  
> LIVE.COM libraries and "modules/demux/livedotcom.cpp" to also use  
> it for RTSP authentication.  Just let me know...

Since we now have the interaction framework this could be possible.
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/browser/trunk/modules/access/http.c#L279

So Ross :D how are we gonna do this :D

DJ

BTW I'm rewriting some parts of our live555 module to be a bit more  
readable atm. that made me remember this issue.