Last week, I was approached by someone asking if we could build a small application that would run a series of videos in a continual loop. I told him it would be pretty simple to do this and that it would only be an afternoon’s work in AIR. So, that evening, I was able to point him to the URL hosting the AIR app. It performed exactly as he requested- user points to a local directory and then all the videos within are run in a loop until the user intervenes. Very simple.
My client had no problem installing the app or running it but asked if it might be possible to inject still images between videos as well. This got me thinking of other useful features and I ended up spending a good deal of time over the Thanksgiving break enhancing and tweaking until I had what you can see below.
The VidLoop application allows a user to specify a directory of media files in order to present them within a semi-infinite loop.
File types that are supported are as follows…
VIDEO: flv, f4v, mp4, m4v
IMAGE: jpg, jpeg, gif, png
The user is able to adjust certain settings based on the controls presented. This includes the amount of time images are to persist on the screen, whether or not to scale these images up to fill the screen, the local directory to pull media from, and whether or not to parse subdirectories. All settings are saved upon each occurrence of a successful run.
Hit ESCAPE to stop a presentation. CLICKING will step through each item and can be used to skip ahead regardless of video length or image duration settings.
I can see a lot of applications for this tool and have begun thinking of some future enhancements; Screensaver Mode, Media Sort Functionality, Randomize Option…
Before AIR, it would be have been a lot of trouble for me to put something like this together. Now, it’s a piece of cake – and this work is very addicting as well!
Grab it, if you wish…
