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At the time time of installing vlc on my laptop I entered the command in terminal vlc. It returned a message saying:

The program vlc is not currently installed. You can install it by typing sudo apt-get install vlc-nox

But instead, I just typed sudo apt-get install vlc. What is vlc-nox? Is it different from vlc?

techraf
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3 Answers3

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vlc-nox package contains a version of VLC that does not require X and that is thus suitable for headless servers.

This Package of VLC contains the bare requirements you need to install. Here is no graphical User Interface included, thus it's also perfectly suitable for server installations (Streaming Server for example) Should you decide to install the GUI modules, vlc-noX will stay installed as a dependency.

Source videolan.org

g_p
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    But what does that actually mean? :-) How can you play a video without X? If you run vlc-nox at the console it will directly play to the console's framebuffer or something like that? – Aaron McDaid Sep 17 '14 at 16:10
  • For streaming media from your server(or say headless server), there is no need of X. – g_p Sep 17 '14 at 18:12
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    @AaronMcDaid You can pass the -I ncurses flag to get a terminal based interface. This also works as an awesome music player. – mchid Feb 04 '16 at 05:47
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    @mchid, that's cool. I had to unset DISPLAY also in order to get it to play the video in the terminal via ASCII art. Crazy, but fun!. unset DISPLAY; vlc -I ncurses video.mpg – Aaron McDaid Feb 05 '16 at 07:43
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VideoLAN Client - without X dependencies

This Package of VLC contains the bare requirements you need to install. Here is no graphical User Interface included, thus it's also perfectly suitable for server installations (Streaming Server for example) . Reference

nux
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vlc-nox is a package of VLC that contains the bare requirements you need to install. There is no graphical User Interface included, thus it's also perfectly suitable for server installations (Streaming Server for example) Should you decide to install the GUI modules, vlc-noX will stay installed as a dependency.VLC

VLC-nox is the GUI-less version of VLC. you don’t need GUI or X to create a VLC streaming server. The VLC GUI is only needed at the client end.

Mitch
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