How can we have form options displayed at the same time as a VLC object
We are recreating some experiments that use videoclips from Audit to OpenSesame (v3). While OpenSesame works better than any other software we tried, there's something we couldn't figure out: how to accept mouse input and display a video through the VLC element (VLC instead of the default gstreamer, because it works on both Linux and Windows). It is important to the experiment, so displaying the Options Form after the video is not a solution.
Ideallly, we hoped we could use a plain canvas and have the video on the one side, and the options on the other side, both displayed and interactable at the same time. Can it be done?
In case it's not clear what I'm asking, or you need to see the experiment, tell me and I will upload a partial sample (considering that the videofiles are of non-trivial size)
Comments
Hi mthad,
I'm the developer of the media player plugins for OpenSesame. What you describe is a feature which is much desired by others (including myself), but it is really hard to implement because of the way OpenSesame currently works: Movies require the screen to be redrawn after every frame, while OpenSesame only does so when a new canvas is to be shown. So the intrinsics of OpenSesame do not allow me to easily integrate movie clips into static canvases that also display something else (like the form you are describing), and make this easily configurable from an interface item or from inline script. Such a feature is high on my to-do list, but I don't think I will get this done anytime soon.
It is possible if you start scripting though. You could use the Custom code box of the newly added media_player_mpy for such a thing (vlc will not work because it does not allow you to draw on top of video frames). I currently don't have an example to give to you, sadly, but maybe I will find the time soon to create something simple that would point you in the right direction.
Thanks for the answer, and for your work on the media plugins.
I will really appreciate some pointers in getting started with the custom code - I'm teaching myself Python to be able to do some more low-level control as well. I assume this is a feature that comes with the release that came out a few days ago, so I will have to update the uni computers.