vlc plugin freezes when democracy (or firefox) is run with -console.

In democracy we use the vlc plugin to display movies on windows. (I'm on xp for testing.)

mozilla has a -console parameter that we use to display debugging information. Unfortunately, when running with the latest vlc version (0.8.6a) this freezes mozilla.

To reproduce, run firefox with the -console parameter (I used the windows command prompt.) Then browse over to http://participatoryculture.org/clahey/revver.html . The console prints a bunch of arg information and then prompts for the user to "Press the RETURN key to continue...". At this point mozilla is frozen. Once you hit return, it prints a bit more information and then loads the page, but the video doesn't display.

On democracy, this happens at startup and hitting return doesn't help.

To debug this, I did a binary search of the vlc svn repository, testing with Democracy.exe -console. The revision is 17739. 17738 does not have the bug. http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/changeset/17739

I hoped that applying the reversed patch to 0.8.6a would fix the problem, but it doesn't apply exactly, and once it's applied (libvlc_common.c moved into libvlc.c), the app no longer works (even without -console.) Our overall patch to vlc is available at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/browser/trunk/dtv-binary-kit/mozplugin/vlc-moz-fix.patch?rev=4093 (the relevant parts are libvlc.c and win32_specific.c.) The problem is different than it is with 17739.

I'm not in front of the machine I've been using for testing, so I don't have the different outputs. I will attach traces of all three states (17738, 17739, and 0.8.6a patched) later tonight.