Re: Strange change in Icecat.

[Mark H Weaver]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> But what I don't know how to do is make VLC connect via a proxy, or Tor.
> Does anyone know?

I spent some time investigating this, but was unsuccessful.

VLC provides, in its advanced preferences, a way to configure a SOCKS
proxy, which is what the local Tor daemon provides and in theory should
be what's needed.  However, I found that it didn't actually work.
Without giving any indication of a problem, VLC simply connected
directly to the skeptoid.com site, without using Tor.  I found a bug
report about this from 2018 in the VLC bug tracker, but the developer's
response was essentially that it was too hard to implement comprehensive
SOCKS proxying in VLC, and that they didn't intend to fix the bug.

I also tried running 'vlc' and 'mpv' within 'torify', which attempts to
use LD_PRELOAD to transparently reroute the network traffic of an
arbitrary program through Tor.  Although I was able to successfully run
'wget' through 'torify' to fetch the skeptoid.com URL, both 'vlc' and
'mpv' didn't appear to make any progress fetching any data.

        Mark

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