Error with PlayMovieAction open

...sorry, I forgot to include version info: MacOS 10.14.6 (Mojave), Igor 8.0.4

Hi Pietro,I just tried this on my system IP9 (Beta) Mac 10.15.7 (Catalina)

So I used the full path.  I used option-right click "Copy -... as PathName" to get the full path and then copy pasted with added quotes.

Andy

Thank you Andy, I got it to work using your code as a starting point. My mistake may have been that the path included escape codes for spaces but was also in quotes. Your example included spaces and that reminded me of the proper handling of spaces in macOS.

The playMovieAction command will be useful for extracting video frames, but it looks like Igor for Mac can no longer play video files. Is this correct? Or can I get Igor to control an external video player?

Hi,

On my system when a play movie command is issued, Quicktime launches and plays the movie.

Andy

pmazzoni wrote:

The playMovieAction command will be useful for extracting video frames, but it looks like Igor for Mac can no longer play video files. Is this correct? Or can I get Igor to control an external video player?

For the PlayMovie operation, Igor Pro 8.04 and Igor Pro 9 will open a movie file using the application on the machine that is associated with the file type of the movie. 

For the PlayMovieAction operation, the documentation of Igor Pro 9 explicitly states that the stop and start keywords are obsolete. I suspect that these keywords are also obsolete in versions of Igor Pro 8 released after macOS 10.15 because Apple removed the functionality Igor relied upon.

Thank you both for clarifying this. Just opening and starting the movie will not be enough for my purposes. I wrote functions that allowed the user to review a video by starting, stopping and jumping to various frames, all within Igor. This will no longer be possible. Time to learn a little more Python.

pmazzoni wrote:

Thank you both for clarifying this. Just opening and starting the movie will not be enough for my purposes. I wrote functions that allowed the user to review a video by starting, stopping and jumping to various frames, all within Igor. This will no longer be possible. Time to learn a little more Python.

Potentially you could use PlayMovieAction extract to extract the frames from the movie into Igor and then display the frames in a graph. You would need to add controls to allow the user to move forward and backward. Actually playing the video (at least at typical video speed) might be possible but isn't necessarily straightforward.

I'm curious to know which Python module you'd use to play the movie. My guess is that the module is using something open source under the hood that isn't practical for a commercial application like Igor to use. You could install ffmpeg on the machine and then call that using ExecuteScriptText. I don't know if ffmpeg provides a way to control playback of the movie.

Can you post the video somwhere?

Adam: I explored using the OpenCV library in Python and got it to half-work (my Python code opens and plays video, but hangs when trying to close it). However, I followed your suggestion for what to try with the playMovieAction in Igor and it works! I open the video with playMovieAction, extract the first frame, plot is as an ImagePlot, and then extract subsequent frames and update the graph each time.

By some coincidence, the computer I am using plays through the frames at a a very similar rate to the actual frame rate. I could later add code to make the loop progress at the same rate as the video's frame rate, regardless of CPU speed. But for my current needs the frame rate does not matter--I just need the user to see the next n frames in the video, at whatever speed. I include the code below.

Thank you Adam!

Thomas: the video was not the problem. It is a simple MP4 clip that was opened with no problem by Igor in earlier macOS versions. And I've been able to open it using playMovieAction.

Here is the code:

Function PlayVideo()

	//Open video file

	playMovieAction open="/Users/pietro/Desktop/IMG_0003.mp4"

	variable refNum = V_value

	print "refNum", refNum

	//Just curious to see how this number behaves. I think it

	//is incremented at each call and is reset after Igor quits

	playMovieAction gotoBeginning	

	//Redundant for now but I will need it later when I want

	//to find out the number of frames in the video clip

	playMovieAction extract

	wave M_MovieFrame

	display

	AppendImage M_MovieFrame

	SetAxis left 719.5,-0.5	//Flips the vertical axis so the video is not upside down

	//The numbers are determined by the clip's height in pixels (800), which I happen to know

	doUpdate

	variable counter

	for (counter = 0; counter < 500; counter += 1)

		//At present I want to show the first 

		//500 frames of the clip. Later I will add code to determine the number of frames

		//in the clip

		playMovieAction step = 1

		playMovieAction extract

		doUpdate

	endFor

	playMovieAction kill

End	//PlayVideo

...sorry about the horrible formatting of the code in my last post. I just learned about "Insert Code Snippet". Here is the code again in the proper format: