Comment by soylentcola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soylentcola | Hacker News Reader

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This is probably semi-off-topic but seeing all the helpful questions and answers in this thread I figured I'd ask:

Is it possible to create a play-along track (along the lines of synced subtitles in a .srt file) or just use a subtitle file with a transparent/invisible font that is either sent to or readable by another app or plugin?

I only ask because I've been trying to think of ways to create synchronized "lighting tracks" that control my Hue lights. Controlling Hue lamps is very basic and involves sending a set of valued to a given lamp that tells it what hue/saturation/brightness to display.

I figured since subtitle tracks are already built to display time-synched info and there are plenty of editors for captioning a video and saving the subs in a small secondary file, it would be an interesting way to trigger other things like lights or other electronics.

I just don't know how a plugin or "companion" program might read the string being displayed at a given time or a player like VLC might write that data to another program while it's playing.

Is this just me misunderstanding how it all works or is it something that could be done with another app or a VLC plugin?

VLC does have a web interface where you can query the position in the current track. Polling that may be accurate enough for what you want.

Interesting... I wonder how much overhead it would take to keep polling like that. I'm not a software or web developer but I like learning things and I'm no stranger to throwing together ugly projects just to see what I can do.

Right now it seems like most of the Hue apps for integration with video work in one of two ways: either sampling color values for what's on screen/what your smartphone's camera is picking up or using companion mobile apps that listen for audio triggers.

The first method tends to result in lots of color changing and it can be distracting in practice. Even if you weight it to be less sensitive, I don't need the lighting to change all the time.

The second method requires you to either edit the audio track to add cues or be involved in the production of the original video. Again, not easy to add after the fact.

Basically I want my "mood lighting" to subtly follow or complement the mood of what's on screen without lots of rapid disco-light changes but I also want the ability to throw in the occasional "punctuation" like bright flashes when there's lightning or an explosion on screen.

I figured a "script" along the lines of a sub track would be a great way to do it since a sub track is already just that: a small file with a script for when to send a string of data to the overlay at certain times. If there was a way to use srt files or the equivalent, you could distribute them easily and load them up in a VLC plugin when you fire up your DVD/Bluray. Probably wouldn't sync up with every pirate rip out there but as long as it worked with the "standard" versions on disc or your home rips with easy editing, it would be a neat project.

Wonder how one would go about writing a plugin for VLC that essentially duplicates the subtitle functionality but sends the data to a server process or other companion app that's listening for lighting values on the fly.

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