Firefly issues / wishes

Hey Andy-

doing some interesting stuff with the video functions - first i've run into a small issue: i think the Counter component is buggy - the reset input doesn't seem to want to allow me to reset it. Next, aspect ratio - currently your bitmap and video importers squash content to square. is there a way to stretch it back to it's input ratio? This isn't the end of the world because i can pre-process the content with blackout bars, but if there's a way to do it in GH that'd be ideal.

Then, i have a few thoughts for the video importer:

First i'd be great to control the frame-rate - i'm not totally sure what the frame rate is controlled by but seems very dependent on other elements in the definition, complexity, and qty of referenced geometries. Even if it has a limit, it'd be nice to be able to lock it in some way.

Beyond that, i want to be able to control the video with gh components: stop/start/reset controlled via boolean! FInally, and it may be more of a long shot, but it'd be great to be able to scrub through video manually one frame at a time (via slider or other ctrl). Again, we have another option for this by exporting videos as frames in VLC, then loading them as an image sequence into GH. but again, if there's a way to do it all in the definition that'd be super cool.

Thoughts?

dan

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on June 2, 2015 at 9:32am

Hey Dan. Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to look into the Counter component. I thought it had been working fine... but I'll have a look. Getting all bitmap components to force resize to their aspect ratio I think should be doable. It's a good idea (and should have been implemented earlier).

Regarding the framerate... that's more tricky. Everything in Firefly is calculated in the standard SolveInstance cycle (much like every other component in GH). What you're asking for is basically having multi-threading which at the moment is tricky with C# components. I'm not saying it's impossible... but definitely tricky at the moment.

Being able to control the start/stop of videos with a boolean input is easy (I've had a similar request for being able to start/stop the Kinect too... I'll put it on the list). Scrubbing the video with a slider is an interesting concept (I hadn't thought about it). I honestly don't know how difficult it would be to do. Much of the video playback feature is implemented by the C_Sawapan_media.dll written by Panagiotis Michalatos. It's possible that this would need to be modified... or perhaps there's something else I could do on my end... but I'll give it some thought. Thanks again for the suggestions.

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