CODEWITHSUNDEEP
luavlc
vsnyc
vsnyc

Reputation: 2257

Building a playlist to play selected portion of media files in vlc

I have a list of media files (DVD VOB files) and I want to watch only a portion of the video from a list of files. 

#! /bin/bash
export SOURCE_DIR=/path/to/dvds/dir
export DVD1=$SOURCE_DIR/dvd1/VIDEO_TS
export DVD2=$SOURCE_DIR/dvd2/VIDEO_TS
export DVD3=$SOURCE_DIR/dvd3/VIDEO_TS
export DVD4=$SOURCE_DIR/dvd4/VIDEO_TS
export FILE1=VTS_01_1.VOB
export FILE2=VTS_01_2.VOB
export FILE3=VTS_01_3.VOB
export FILE4=VTS_01_4.VOB

vlc --play-and-exit --start-time=348 --stop-time=355 $DVD1/$FILE1
vlc --play-and-exit --start-time=574 --stop-time=594 $DVD1/$FILE2
#... and so on ...

I came up with the above script that starts up a vlc instance and plays each file from a specified start-time and stop-time. This works fine but spins up a new instance of vlc at every vlc --play-and-exit statement, and there is visible interruption as a result between files.

Is there a way to integrate a playlist rule into vlc so a single instance can keep playing all the videos in the script file?

It can be assumed that I know the start-time and stop-time values for each file

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2367

Answers (1)

vsnyc
vsnyc

Reputation: 2257

I was able to make this work by following the instructions here. VLC has lua scripting support. Below is the script I came up with, it takes in a file ending in .fixedseek extension. The playlist file is a csv file with three columns containing file_path_url, start_time, stop_time e.g.

file:///path/to/dvds/dvd1/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_3.VOB,348,355
file:///path/to/dvds/dvd2/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_3.VOB,548,855
... and so on ...

The script parses the file and plays each row from start_time to stop_time

-- fixedseek.lua
-- A compiled version of this file (.luac) should be put into the proper VLC playlist parsers directory.
-- In my ubuntu 14.04 vlc installation, it was: /usr/lib/vlc/lua/playlist/
-- For details, refer to:
-- http://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Play_HowTo/Building_Lua_Playlist_Scripts
--
-- The play list file format consists of three comma separated parts:
-- (file_path_url, start_time, stop_time)
-- e.g.
-- file:///path/to/dvds/dvd1/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_3.VOB,348,355

-- The script below opens the file, seeks to start_time and plays until stop_time
-- and then moves on to next file in the playlist

function probe()
    -- tell VLC we will handle anything ending in ".fixedseek"
    return string.match(vlc.path, "%.fixedseek$")
end

function parse()
    -- VLC expects us to return a list of items, each item itself a list
    -- of properties
    playlist = {}

    while true do
       playlist_item = {}

       line = vlc.readline()

       if line == nil then
           break
    else vlc.msg.info(" Read line: '"..line.."'")
       end

-- parse playlist line into three tokens splitting on comma
values = {}
i=0
for word in string.gmatch(line, '([^,]+)') do
    values[i]=word
    i=i+1
end

vlc.msg.info(values[0])
vlc.msg.info(values[1])
vlc.msg.info(values[2])

       playlist_item.path = values[0]
       start_time = values[1]
       stop_time = values[2]

     vlc.msg.info("  Start is '"..tostring(start_time).."'")
     vlc.msg.info("  Stop is '"..tostring(stop_time).."'")

       -- a playlist item has another list inside of it of options
       playlist_item.options = {}
       table.insert(playlist_item.options, "start-time="..tostring(start_time))
       table.insert(playlist_item.options, "stop-time="..tostring(stop_time))
       table.insert(playlist_item.options, "fullscreen")

       -- add the item to the playlist
       table.insert( playlist, playlist_item )
    end

    return playlist
end

Upvotes: 2

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