Sequencing Videos?

[kkmm]

Hey KC,

Thank you, thank you for this great software!! I've been having a ball programming and modifying my display layout almost every day. It seems everytime I look on the internet, I get a new idea I want to try out for this Christmas season. Which brings me to my idea...

What are the possiblilties of being able to program a sequence to a .WMV file (Windows Media Video)? Or any other video format for that matter... My idea is to project a Christmas music video on an exterior screen (white shower curtain) with my multimedia projector and sequence the Christmas lights to the same music, all on one machine. Is this even possible?

I apologize if this has been covered before, but I couldn't find anything on it.

Thank you again for all this wonderful Blinky blinky!! I couldn't do it without you, or the rest of the great minds here.

[KC]

There is something that may be what you want. The Launcher plugin will launch external applications based on trigger levels. You tell it the path of the program to launch, any command line parameters, and what cell level should trigger it. You could have a single channel devoted to triggering Windows Media Player and have that channel go only to the Launcher plugin. Let me know if this doesn't make sense.

[cgarwood]

My only concern with using windows media player is the fact that it would take extra time to load, and that the loading time may be different each time it is played,therefor it could cause the video and lights to be out of sync.

[kkmm]

I'm testing that now to see if it can be sync'd up. Ideally, it would be very cool to sync the music straight from the video, (Make .mov or .wmv video formats supported. Like MP3's and WAVs are.)

I'm looking at using a generic, free video player (Mplayer) http://www.mplayerhq.hu as it has extensive command-line options and I believe will run quite a bit faster than the heavier GUI related Windows Media, Realplayer, Quicktime, etc, yet supports all those formats. It'll even stream from the 'net. I like that you can also use it to extract the audio from certain types of videos.

I'll keep you all abreast of how it goes. :D

[cgarwood]

I'm testing that now to see if it can be sync'd up. Ideally, it would be very cool to sync the music straight from the video, (Make .mov or .wmv video formats supported. Like MP3's and WAVs are.)

...

I'll keep you all abreast of how it goes. :D

Any new updates?

[sheading]

I have been thinking about the same thing. I am planning on using 7 of my output channels to send signals to another PC running PowerPoint. I'll detect the input on the second PC using the parallel port and VBA. I'll probably use a separate PowerPoint file for each song. This should work, I hope. I'll probable try it out in the next 2 weeks.