Pc scientist and maker Ben Henshaw has launched a software for turning a Raspberry Pi single-board laptop into an interactive video participant for artwork installations and extra — avoiding the delays current in rival options.
“Final yr, I began on my first RPi venture, which was an artwork set up for an interactive brief movie. The medium was pixel artwork on a CRT show, by which customers would be capable to press buttons and switch keys to immediate the subsequent sequence within the movie,” Henshaw explains. “The set up was a post-apocalyptic retrospective on nuclear struggle as displayed on a simulacrum of an air-gapped nuclear missile command terminal utilizing pixel artwork and rendering strategies idiosyncratic to early graphical interfaces.”
Fairly quickly into improvement of the video artwork set up, although, Henshaw bumped into an issue. “One of many issues that blew my thoughts about this venture,” he explains, “is that there did not appear to be any present interactive video participant that met my specs (i.e., one which responds to and tolerates concurrent IO) that wasn’t sluggish, vulnerable to failure, or completely outdated.”
The answer: a Python-based wrapper for the mpv video participant which helps the flexibility to load a single grasp clip, loop sections, and bounce round at-will based mostly on bodily button presses — and which avoids delays when switching sections, apparent buffering, juddering, or the sudden look of an incongruous graphical consumer interface overlay, all of which have been points plaguing Henshaw’s makes an attempt to make use of present options.
Extra info is obtainable on Henshaw’s Reddit submit, whereas the supply code for the venture has been launched on GitHub underneath the reciprocal GNU Normal Public License 3. “I hope,” Henshaw says, “that the interactive video engine might be of use to different folks in [the Raspberry Pi] group.”
