Video Cues

Before trying to use the video abilities of Cue Player, please be sure you have updated your copy of XP to Service Pack 3 and at least have installed the .NET 3.0 components. The Windows drivers that are installed are required. Vista and Windows 7 users should already have the correct drivers.

Some explanation on the video player is in order, however. The best way to use it is to have two video cards in your show computer and set up Windows for a dual monitor display. You can set that up to have the Cue Player control display on either the left or right and slide the video player over to the other. The little button with the monitor icon will put you in full screen mode. Even more, if you right click it while it is still on the same screen as Cue Player (like at startup), it will move the player over and make it full screen in one click. Which way it goes depends on which half, left or right, the window is when you click. You can also double click on the screen part to go full screen or not. A right click on the screen will bring up a menu about hiding controls and such.

Video cues have some additional information in them from sound cues. At the end of each cue is a series of two or more numbers e.g. C;\video.mpg;0,150, or C:\video.avi;0,132,400. The numbers indicate where the movie is to start and where it is to pause or stop. In the first example, the movie would start at 0 and stop at 150. In the second, the movie would start at 0, pause at 132 and if resumed, go on to 400 before stopping.

Unlike sound cues which can be buffered such that cue #3 with one sound can be immediately followed by cue #4 with another and #4 can be selected waiting to be played, back-to-back video cues need a fade or stop action cue between them.

Displaying a live video feed, such as from X10 VA12 or Sabrent usb-avcpt dongles, is done by first running Playwin in standalone mode (without Cue Player), right clicking on the Play button, selecting the capture input you need, your image should appear, and then restarting Playwin. Create your video cue with the word "live" as the cue file name.

Communications - select how the video window will communicate with Cue Player. The main video uses either Windows messaging or networking. A Slave can use networking or a serial null modem cable to a second computer. Networking is recommended for either.

Timing - select either using timing information from the playing media itself of an internal timer. The interval of the internal timer is set in milliseconds. Experience has shown that more repeatable timings come from the internal timer.

As Is - when displaying images (.bmp, .jpg,, .tif, .png, etc.) the displayed image is rendered at whatever size it is, independent of the video player window size. Depending on the relative sizes, only part of the image may appear.

Network - when the video communication is via the network, the IP address of the computer running Cue Player must be entered so Playwin can find it. If running on the same computer as Cue Player itself, 127.0.0.1 should connect no matter what the actual address is. The port number must match that selected in Cue Player. If you do not want to click the connect icon every time, select AutoConnect. If the video player is running on a remote computer not running Cue Player, then Remote from CP should be checked to improve command response time. Remote computer ports start at 5900 and increment by one for each running instance up to 4. You can edit the cueplayer.ini file and change that if needed.

Play Delay - there was an issue (since been corrected) with a brief flash of a prior paused video cue upon display of the next. The fade in of a cue was delayed by the amount of this setting to avoid that. It can still be used to 'tweak' sychronization of two computers.

Resize to Last - when the screen icon toolbar button is clicked, the screen will resize to what is was when shut down. Otherwise it will revert to fullscreen.

Right clicking in the black background of the player will bring up a menu of the running controls and appearance options. Full Screen and Hide Controls are toggles for those two options. When more than one monitor is setup in Windows, the option to quickly move and make fullscreen to either additional monitor is enabled.

Just a general note – playing videos is not easy for computers. There are many drivers, codecs, splitters, and decoders involved. Included in the install are ones that I trust. If you install other players and tools on the same computer you can run into conflicts. Nero is a case in point. It will cause a windows player to pop up when you use Cue Player. Annoying. If you experience conflicts or problems with particular video formats, there is a button on the player (the one with the ?) that will create a file ‘filtergraph.txt’ that will list all the software pieces that your computer is using to render a video. You can use that to help resolve the problem. The program Gspot may also be useful.