Queue the Madness song “Baggy Trousers” – “Oh what fun we had …”
(Not a lot of fun WAS had actually).
A lot of our customers use VLC Media Player. I’d put it down to the fact that it plays DVD movies. Windows Media Player doesn’t* And our customers do like being able to watch “The Golden Child” on their computers.
The brief? Deploy the latest version of VLC to 4000+ computers.
Silently. With some program shortcuts moved & removed.
It was surprisingly hard. Here’s why:
- the standard VLC .exe only supports the “/S” silent switch.
No other customisations are possible. - on the first launch of VLC Player, it has an annoying prompt for
”Allow fetching media information from Internet”
”Check for updates”
No, I don’t want 4000+ corporate computers going to the internet for updates, so I needed to turn that off. - and VLC Cache Generating “DOS Box” appears on first launch.
Even if you ask for a silent installation, this annoying window pops up:
I couldn’t fix this and that annoys me. I mean, why have a silent install option if it’s not going to be silent???
So it looked like I had to create a custom installation package. The choices where either a MSI based installer package, or customise the NSIS installer VLC uses. Since I was running out of time, I took the quicker way out and modified the NSIS install script. Those changes were:
vlc.win32.nsi
InstallDir "C:\WISEFAQ\VideoLAN\VLC"
CreateShortCut "$SMPROGRAMS\VideoLAN\\VLC media player.lnk" \
"$INSTDIR\vlc.exe" "--no-qt-privacy-ask --no-qt-updates-notif"
And it works. Mostly. Except for that darn VLC-CACHE-GEN box still appearing.
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