Sean Meighan
Welcome => Do You Need Help? Post it here => Topic started by: Scott on September 12, 2019, 04:43:56 PM
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Sorry for the dumb question. I have a very small show that I run with Xlights. I'm thinking of adding a projector on one side of my house. Searching through these forums, it looks like most people recommend using FPP when doing this. Is there any way to do it just with Xlights? I don't know how to use FPP and I don't know if I have time to learn.
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Sure. Xlights or more correctly xschedule can do this.
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Thanks! Is it better to play the video through Xschedule? Or can I use Xlights to just play the small snippets of video at the times I want to? If it is better to use Xschedule, any recommendations on programs I could use to sequence my snippets of videos into one long movie?
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If you do it in xlights you will forego a lot of resolution.
X schedule let’s you offset the start time of the video.
I use da Vinci resolve for video editing but there are much simpler options which will likely better fit your needs.
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Thanks for the help! So I will do it in Xschedule instead of xlights.
Dumb question, I can't figure out how to play a video in xschedule. I just see a place to add FSEQand Video, but not a place to add just a video. Can you please point me in the right direction or where to look for help (video or manual)?
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Use an advanced playlist to gain access to additional playlist items. All of the xschedule into videos go over this.
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Thanks. Hopefully one last question. So I got Xschedule to play my video, but it puts it on my laptop screen instead of the projector. How do I tell it (xschedule or windows) to play the video on my projector instead of my laptop?
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You click the button on the properties to place the player window in the right location
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Thanks. Don't know how I missed that.
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Sorry, more questions. If I play my small show without the movie file, it is fine (well, it is fine after I stop and restart it a couple times). When I try to play my show with the movie file, nothing works (the movie freezes, the lights don't work and the stop all button in xschedule is greyed out.) Any advice?
My first thought was that the movie files was too big (~288 megs). So I rendered it at 15 fps instead of 60fps, it got the size down to ~150 megs but I still have the same problem.
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Do you have video caching turned on.
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I assume you are talking about the cache video option in xschedule. No, I don't have that on. I will try running it again tonight with that on. Thanks for the quick response!!!
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I also have an experimental version of xlights using hardware decoding of video you could try out.
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So when I turn on video cache, the rest of the show (lights, sound) plays fine, but the projector just puts out a blank screen. (i.e. Before I start the show the projector shows my desktop. Now it is just showing a black box instead of my video) Is there something else I need to do to load the video into the cache (am I even saying that right?)
Thanks. I don't know what the hardware decoding of the video means.
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Hardware decoding of the video offloads some of the work to your graphics card which should improve video playback.
Turning on video caching just starts a background thread which reads ahead in the video and tries to keep the video flowing smoothly. If your machine is struggling this may not help. What type of machine is it?
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Thanks for the explanations.
I am using a fairly new HP laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx, 8 Gig of RAM.
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I should probably add that I am using an USB dongle to VGA to a 50foot VGA cable to my projector.
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I will pm you a test link later tonight.
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Thank you so much for doing that. Unfortunately, I see the same behavior that I was seeing with the regular version. With Video cache off, the lights on DMX work intermittently and the video displays a single frame about every 5s. If I turn video cache on, the DMX lights work perfectly, but I get a blank screen instead of any projection.
Thanks for all the help. Any ideas? What can I try next?
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I need more time to work through the hardware acceleration.
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Thanks. I appreciate the help. Please let me know if you have any more ideas of things I should try or test.
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Sorry, just some more dumb questions. Aren't other people using Xschedule to do video? I am the first one to try?
If this doesn't work, I think I read that most people use FPP, should I try that?
Thanks again for all your help.
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Thanks for the new version. I just sent you a message. It is doing the same thing. With video caching on, the rest of the show (DMX lights and a pixel matrix) play great, but the video is just a black screen. With that off, everything plays, but sputters very badly, like showing a frame every couple of seconds.
CPU is only at 20%. What is causing the sputtering.
Thanks again for all your help.
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I need to see logs at this point. Once we have hardware acceleration on video there is not a lot more we can do unless there is something else going on.
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I have been through this Scott and I now know where the issue is and it is not great.
While I have accelerated the video decoding ... once we have decoded the video we need to resize it and convert it ready for display. Unfortunately on windows it is really difficult to offload this to hardware. I have a concept of how to do this but this could take several weeks to months to deliver.
So what are your options.
Realistically the only way to improve this on windows alone is to reduce the video size on the screen. Maybe drop the resolution ... smaller screen sizes will render fast.
The other option is to use a pi to display the video. The Pi uses a different mechanism to display videos which means it will work (even though the pi has less grunt).
I wont stop working on it but I want to give you options to go forward.