Is there Multi-media support in Python ?

[Will]

Is there multi-media support in Python? So I can...

1 - play video in all the standard formats... windows & Mac?
2 - play flash files
3 - Power Point
4 - Standard graphic formats
5 - Sound in all the standard formats
6 - etc

Please note requirements: And, on video's, flash files, Power Point, Graphic
files, I need to have those show within my programs "window" along with some
other text... so I need to be able to size the video and locate it in the
window... so if the program simply pop's up the Windows Media Player or
QuickTime or whatever as a separate window... no good... it all needs to be
integrated into a single window along with text and other stuff...

If so, is it in the standard release or has someone created a module just
for multi-media integration?

Thanks for any help - Will

 

[DH]

Is there multi-media support in Python? So I can...

1 - play video in all the standard formats... windows & Mac?
2 - play flash files
3 - Power Point
4 - Standard graphic formats
5 - Sound in all the standard formats
6 - etc

Please note requirements: And, on video's, flash files, Power Point, Graphic
files, I need to have those show within my programs "window" along with some
other text... so I need to be able to size the video and locate it in the
window... so if the program simply pop's up the Windows Media Player or
QuickTime or whatever as a separate window... no good... it all needs to be
integrated into a single window along with text and other stuff...

If so, is it in the standard release or has someone created a module just
for multi-media integration?

Thanks for any help - Will

Not really. Not like the java media framework or QT4Java.
Someone is working on video playing in python that works on Windows or
Macs but it's still being developed:
http://www2.wcer.wisc.edu/Transana/Develop

Also, in wxPython on Windows only, you can embed Internet Explorer or
other ActiveX objects including the Media Player & Powerpoint I assume.
Run the demo for an example: http://www.wxpython.org/
I guess the easiest thing to do would just be to embed Internet Explorer
and have it load a page that plays the movie or flash file.

Even easier though would just be to make your application a web
application and let the browser be the whole interface.

 

[Thomas Heller]

Is there multi-media support in Python? So I can...

1 - play video in all the standard formats... windows & Mac?
2 - play flash files
3 - Power Point
4 - Standard graphic formats
5 - Sound in all the standard formats
6 - etc

Please note requirements: And, on video's, flash files, Power Point, Graphic
files, I need to have those show within my programs "window" along with some
other text... so I need to be able to size the video and locate it in the
window... so if the program simply pop's up the Windows Media Player or
QuickTime or whatever as a separate window... no good... it all needs to be
integrated into a single window along with text and other stuff...

If so, is it in the standard release or has someone created a module just
for multi-media integration?

Well, maybe pygame contains something like this.

OTOH, there's Henk Punt's venster library, which is based on the ctypes
module. (If you use windows you may want to look into ctypes anyway - it
allows to make windows api calls even when they are not wrapped by Mark
Hammond's win32all extensions.)

venster contains samples which embed the internet explorer webbrowser
control in a window, it can has a sample which plays flash files in a
window, and it shows how to embed the windows media player.

You can probably to something similar using the pythonwin application
framework in win32all (oh, wait, the official name is now pywin32) which
is based on a python wrapping of the mfc.

Thomas

 

[Will]

Thomas,

I'll check out your & DH's suggestions. I was hoping for a clean easy to do
this.

DH mentioned that someone was working on this... any idea who?

Doing it on the net is not an option we want to consider now for a varity of
reasons.

Thanks for the help - I will check out your suggestions.

Will

 

[Paul Prescod]

Is there multi-media support in Python? So I can...

1 - play video in all the standard formats... windows & Mac?
2 - play flash files
3 - Power Point
4 - Standard graphic formats
5 - Sound in all the standard formats
6 - etc

Python is a programming language. All it does is computations. Python
can be embedded into environments that can do more than computations.
e.g. you can embed it into a Windows MFC window or a Pygame application
or a Macintosh Carbon application. In each environment you will get a
different mix of features.

If you tell us your operating system we can tell you what environment
you might want to embed Python in with all of these capabilities. Python
itself has a lot less to do with it than the GUI you are using Python
within.

Paul Prescod

 

[DH]

Python is a programming language. All it does is computations. Python
can be embedded into environments that can do more than computations.
e.g. you can embed it into a Windows MFC window or a Pygame application
or a Macintosh Carbon application. In each environment you will get a
different mix of features.

If you tell us your operating system we can tell you what environment
you might want to embed Python in with all of these capabilities. Python
itself has a lot less to do with it than the GUI you are using Python
within.

He already did. See the excerpt you quoted.

 

[Will]

Paul,

Thanks for the note.

One of the reasons we were interested in Python is that, we thought, capible
of creating software that will run on Mac, Windows or Linux systems.

I understand that Python itself is the basic language and that there are
add-ons for other stuff... like win32all, wxPython, Py2exe, NumArray,
PythonCard, etc...

I was just hoping that someone had created some code to interface directly
with the various media players out there like Quicktime and Windows Media
Player... and that we could use that to call up a player in the corner of a
window... Sorta like you can with Macromedia's Authorware or Matchware's
Mediator 7... and probably Macromedia's Director and other such progframs.

So, the answer to what system is all the popular systems.

I'll keep poking around.

Best,

Will

 

[Josiah Carlson]

One of the reasons we were interested in Python is that, we thought, capible

of creating software that will run on Mac, Windows or Linux systems.

I understand that Python itself is the basic language and that there are
add-ons for other stuff... like win32all, wxPython, Py2exe, NumArray,
PythonCard, etc...

You will find that Python will interface with quite a few Windows
components with win32all (now pywin32 I believe), of course there is
already os.startfile() for simple "open this file with the appropriate
viewer" applications.


Depending on the 'multimedia' you want to deal with, wxPython is capable
of embedding various objects into itself. On Windows it seems to be
fairly trivial to embed Internet Explorer in a wxPython window, which
could be used with the standard IE plugins to view media.

On other platforms, perhaps wxMozilla
(http://wxmozilla.sourceforge.net/) would satisfy a large portion of
your requirements. It may take some work to get it working with
wxPython, but it also may be a quick SWIG run. As it stands, wxMozilla
runs on all major platforms, so may be your best bet for images and
multimedia with browser plugins.


- Josiah