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3R1C · Mar 5, 2002, 06:09 AM

now that dvd player has been updated, i believe that the dream app that alot of us has been looking for can be realized.

remember that hack where you set your desktop (or terminal background) to rgb 0,16,0 an then start a dvd playing, hide dvd player and then your desktop is the movie? well now that dvd player is scriptable and plays video_ts folders shouldn't it be fairly easy to make an app that does this for you? I'm going to make an applescript studio app which does this, but i believe this app would be better served as a cocoa pref pane. I know nothing about cocoa.

what do you think?

ksuther · Mar 5, 2002, 10:31 AM

Well, stuff like SaverLab does this is screensavers, so it's feasable, but it would take up the full CPU to do it, and you'd get like 5 frames a second with it in the background :-/

3R1C · Mar 5, 2002, 05:59 PM

not true.

i do it all the time now, but i use a real dvd in the drive, not a ts-folder. if the media was on my drive it would use LESS cpu.

ruttopia · Mar 6, 2002, 07:35 AM

Why not learn Cocoa? This could be a great app to start with. I can't imagine the preferences pane would be very in-depth -- at least to start. I'm just learning Cocoa, but hey, if you wanna give it a shot:

ruttopia@mac.com

ruttopia · Mar 6, 2002, 07:46 AM

I can't find any information on this hack -- any links?

SoClose · Mar 6, 2002, 01:24 PM

The DVD Player does this through the magic of chromakey -- the same technology used by your local weatherperson to stand infront of moving maps of weather. With a DVD playing, any pixel on the screen that's a certain color will display the DVD image. But how to you set the rectangle of where the DVD image is? That's got to be done at a level below which Cocoa can reach. You might need to check out the frame buffer of the video card or something like that.

3R1C · Mar 6, 2002, 02:08 PM

well the way i determine where the rectangle is presently, is that i maximize the dvd window, then hide it. the dvd then fills the screen. As it is, this setup doesn't skip, accepts desktop clicks, and doesnt use much processor. I believe that if I was to do the same thing but have dvd.app play a Ts-folder from disk, it would use even less resources. the only thing holding me up from doing this via applescript studio is that I have no way of authoring one of these ts_folder deallies. Im not sure but I think that dvd pro makes thes ts folders.