VLC Immediate Crash on macOS

Checklist

• This is a bug report.
• Streamlink is working correctly on my system without using the Twitch GUI.
• I tried solving my issue by reading the project’s wiki first.
• I used the search function to find already opened/closed issues or pull requests.

Description

VLC on macOS crashes immediately after successfully launching a stream through the GUI.

My fix on pre-1.3.x versions of the GUI was to use --verbose=0 as a parameter to VLC. I know that this does nothing for VLC, but it allowed the stream to play. This fix doesn’t work on current versions of the GUI because of the bug I believe you are aware of from #463.

What does appear to work is using rtmp as the passthrough option. I tried both http and hls and both crashed VLC in a similar manner. The error I received from VLC when using http or hls is shown in figure 1. Figure 2 shows what happens when I attempt to pass -v to VLC. I have also included the GUI logs which correspond to the 2 test cases.

Expected / Actual behavior

VLC will not crash when playing a stream with either http and hls passthrough.

Reproduction steps

1. Install streamlink v0.6.0 via pip, streamlink-twitch-gui v1.3.1 from GitHub releases, and VLC v2.2.5.1 from the official site.
2. Start a random stream.
3. VLC opens with error log message and then immediately closes.

Environment details (operating system, etc.)

macOS 10.11.6 streamlink 0.6.0 (installed via pip) streamlink-twitch-gui 1.3.1 VLC 2.2.5.1

Comments, logs, screenshots, etc.

Figure 1. VLC Error Log

Figure 2. GUI Error Message

Log 1. GUI log for normal operation GUI Log (Normal Operation).txt

Log 2. GUI log for VLC verbose GUI Log (VLC Verbose Operation).txt

[bastimeyer]

I can submit an issue with streamlink devs if you want.

Sure… This is obviously a bug. This happens with every single hyphen parameter, not just -v.

$ streamlink -p vlc -a "-a {filename}" twitch.tv/CHANNEL best
usage: streamlink [OPTIONS] <URL> [STREAM]
streamlink: error: argument -a/--player-args: expected one argument

$ streamlink -p vlc -a "a {filename}" twitch.tv/CHANNEL best
[cli][info] Found matching plugin twitch for URL twitch.tv/CHANNEL
^CInterrupted! Exiting...

$ streamlink -p vlc -a "--a {filename}" twitch.tv/CHANNEL best
[cli][info] Found matching plugin twitch for URL twitch.tv/CHANNEL
^CInterrupted! Exiting...

the instant crash in VLC only happens when both --play-and-exit and --input-title-format are used simultaneously.

#355 VLC on MacOS is ridiculous… Well then, I guess the best option would be disabling custom titles in MacOS. The --play-and-exit param can’t be removed and is necessary to be able close streams from the GUI, so that VLC doesn’t ignore SIGTERM signals sent by Streamlink.

[404NetworkError]

After a little more testing, the instant crash in VLC only happens when both --play-and-exit and --input-title-format "{name} - {game} - {status}" are used simultaneously. If used individually or neither, VLC works just fine.

Having both options selected in a Windows 10 Creators Update environment does not cause the same problem.