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JohnCoates / Aerial

Apple TV Aerial Screensaver for Mac
MIT License
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Grouping similar videos for independent multi-display mode #877

Open thavidu opened 4 years ago

thavidu commented 4 years ago

I liked the idea of the spanned mode for multiple-displays but the resolution is too low when spreading across 3 monitors. The independent mode works well but when you have all the videos selected, the 3 that it picks can be completely unrelated to each other.

Since the videos are already grouped by location and by day/night- could we have an option for the Independent mode to select 3 videos from the same group, for my 3 monitors? ie. All the 3 of the great wall videos, or even all 6 of the china day videos could be shown simultaneously. Or all 3 monitors could pull from the day time set of San Francisco for example, showing different aspects of the same city.

In the current version, I saw a dessert, a city and an urban park from different locations when I tried it just now..

Even better would be getting to choose our own groups, but I imagine that UI would be too complicated / not worth the effort.

glouel commented 4 years ago

Hi @thavidu

In theory I completely agree with the idea, but in practice I'm not sure it's doable. Part of the issue is, videos don't have the same length. So if you could pick from the same group on startup (not easy because they are kinda independent but let's assume), the video will end on one of your three screens before the other two. And because there's such a large variation in duration, one screen may play 5 videos while another only play 3 and the other 4. So they will get desynced, even if they had agreed to first play from SF, then from LA, then from Space, etc.

I guess it could work if you only kept them in one group for the duration. But if you do that, you might as well just select SF videos and unselect all the others and get the exact same result.

One solution I'd see, it may be possible to shorten the videos to the length of the shortest one... but that's a huge can of bugs with the current code that do expect videos to play till the end.

I do like the idea but I don't think it's doable right now. I need to rework some of the code that handles that playback for a multiple computer sync feature that was discussed in another issue. Solving those issues there would solve what's needed here too as their needs are similar (playing partial videos and syncing). This may take some time though !