NAME

Video::PlaybackMachine - Perl extension for creating a television station

DESCRIPTION

PlaybackMachine is a television broadcast system. You can tell it to play AVI files at specific times, and it will do so. Whenever nothing is scheduled to be playing, it will create filler from a variety of sources.

For example, let's say that I've scheduled "Plan Nine From Outer Space" at 3:00 PM on Saturday, January 12th, 2008, and scheduled "The X From Outer Space" at 5:00 PM on the same day. I start the Playback Machine on Friday night. Until 3:00 on Saturday, it shows slides, plays background music, tells the audience that "Plan Nine" is next, and plays short films. On 3:00 it runs "Plan Nine". When Ed Wood's masterpiece is finished, it fills time again until 5:00.

Potential uses include:

• Automating a television station

• Running movies at a convention

• Kiosks

The Playback Machine uses Video::Xine (and hence libxine) to play movies and music. Any video format that Xine is comfortable with is perfectly OK to Playback Machine.

METHODS

CLASS METHODS

run()

  run( $start_time )

Runs the Playback Machine according to the current configuration. $start_time should be the time when the Playback Machine session started; it defaults to time().

get_offset()

  get_offset( $start_time, $table )

Calculates the schedule offset from the configuration. The $table parameter is a Video::PlaybackMachine::ScheduleTable::DB object, and is used to calculate the start time when the 'start' config parameter is set to 'first'.

SEE ALSO

playback_machine.pl(1)

xine-lib, http://www.xinehq.de

Video::Xine

"How Perl Saved BayCon TV", http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=601001

AUTHOR

Stephen Nelson, <stephen@cpan.org<gt>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2003-2008 by Stephen Nelson

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.