Video Playback in Linux

[alasdair23]

We're running in Ubuntu 8.04 and getting pretty good results out of RR 2.9 - however, there's some odd things going on with the video playback.

Our video clip player is set to mPlayer and we can load clips to play, however a number of the functions don't work.

Most annoyingly, setting looping to true does not actually loop the clip. Does anyone know of any workarounds for this?

I've tried using idle in order to trap when the currentTime of the clip is at the end of the clip, then setting the currentTime to 0 but - guess what - I can't seem to successfully set the currentTime

Any feedback greatly appreciated.

[Mark]

Hi alasdair23,

Perhaps you could handle the playStopped message. Please, let us know whether this works for you.

Best,

Mark

[alasdair23]

Mark, you're a genius.

So I tried the playStopped handler and it works perfectly! I'm coming to RunRev from HyperCard/SuperCard and so totally missed this message event, which has totally fixed my issues.

That said, worth noting that under Linux [Ubuntu 8.04] and with the video player set to mPlayer there's lots of RunRev 2.9 that won't work [like being able to set the currentTime of a player].

Reading the documentation [I do RTFM, honest...] it looks like xAnim is the preferred video player but this was deprecated from modern Linux distros about 6 years ago... so it might be neat for RunRev to let us know what they recommend.

[alasdair23]

Running under Ubuntu 8.04 with completely up-to-date system and noticing some interesting video issues while using mplayer as the videoclipplayer:

[a] setting the looping property has no effect.
cannot set the currentTime of a movie.
[c] potential memory leakage resulting in app quitting when repeatedly playing a video.

In general I find if something goes a bit hokey with video [eg. having to open/close video files frequently] then a full reboot is required to get things back to normal.

I've also tried setting the videoclipplayer to something other than mplayer, but mplayer always seems to be used no matter what I specify.

Does anyone have a vetted list of Runrev video commands that work or don't work?