[F.Rq] 'Play Movie' dialog improvements

[RetroEdit]

I was just talking about this in Discord, and I realized I don't really use the 'Play Movie' dialogue anymore, and I haven't used in the last few months when I've been using BizHawk fairly regularly. There are a few reasons for this (maybe some of these could be split into separate issues).

• [x] 1. One major issue I've had is that the play movie dialog can get really slow if you have too many movies because it has to calculate the time duration for each movie, which currently involves reading the entire input log. Even a few movies could be somewhat annoying. (see also: #2198)
• [x] 2. The main issue for me is that I tend to work on movies very slowly in a version independent manner, so I try and keep each of them near a directory specific to their game. So generally I just drag+drop or use recent movies to play my movies back because my movies are missing from Play Movie's default directory. Maybe Play Movie could be enhanced to also populate from Movies > Recent? Or perhaps there's another solution for either my workflow or Play Movie UI?
  • [2024-08-05] My solution recently: set the max items for "Recent" extremely high. But long-term I'd like better TAS project management in general, where multiple movies/RAM watch/scripts can be associated as part of a single "project": #3988
• [ ] 3. Another side-issue is that for .bk2 files, it's annoying to edit basic movie metadata. TAStudio has Metadata > Header..., but for .bk2s, I generally just resort to extracting their contents and editing them manually. Play movie already displays basic metadata, so it could potentially allow editing basic movie metadata like authors, although I don't entirely like that solution from a UI perspective.
• [x] 4. (2023-08-15) On Discord, it was pointed out that the file path takes up a lot of space in the play movie dialog, making it difficult to see the actual filenames. I agree, although if it was abbreviated to just the filename, I think there should still be a convenient way to see the full file path (perhaps another option under the right-click context menu Edit for Open file path? Or probably more sensibly, just a separate column)
• 5. (2023-09-22) I recently realized Play Movie will automatically override your `On Movie End` setting to be `Record`. - (2024-08-06) Split out into #3989

[Morilli]

1. Could you give some example values of what you're seeing, like how many movies do you have, how long does the dialog load? fwiw, testing locally with 2700 backup tasproj files with about 1.5 minute length each, the dialog only takes about 1 second to load, which I find acceptable. That said however, I do agree that having to read the entire input log for the sole purpose of displaying the frame count of each movie is ridiculous.
2. Would changing the global Movies folder path work for you?
3. You can right-click a movie in the dialog and select Edit, which probably opens the default application you have set; for more it opens the bk2 in 7-zip which means I can just edit it.

[RetroEdit]

1. It's been a while since I've tested and I've gotten a better computer since then. But to my recollection, it would sometimes take 30 seconds for loading movie files whenever I had multiple larger files in the directory. I'll try and do some tests to see if this is still a concern, but I think the performance might differ if you had a few larger files that were several hours each.
2. No, changing the global Movies path really wouldn't. Because each movie is in a game-specific directory as I described. (I don't deny that this might just be a personal issue with my workflow being incompatible with the general workflow BizHawk was designed for)
3. Sure, that's fine, but that's more of a workaround, and you can only edit that when the movie isn't already open in BizHawk. And that's basically what I already do, minus using Play Movie part. Edit: specifically, certain things like the author field should be freely editable, because they don't affect sync. And they are editable in TAStudio.

[YoshiRulz]

Make sure to test on a dev build that includes https://github.com/TASEmulators/BizHawk/commit/fe845ce8efae8fa3b11d04079d3ae20ec844ea8a

re: 2) a path system redesign would benefit you then?

[RetroEdit]

I'll be sure to test using a dev build that includes fe845ce. As for 2), maybe? Hm. I'm a bit sleep-deprived and don't currently have full capacity brain power to think through that right now, but that could actually benefit me in general if I normalized my own directories a bit more. I also store Lua scripts and notes near the movie file, though I'm a bit inconsistent on the exact directory structures. To be honest, I was considering consolidating Lua scripts though so they could be redistributed in a more sensible way.

[RetroEdit]

Okay, I re-tested the Play Movie slowness. Looks like that was fixed sometime between 2.8 and 2.9.1.

[YoshiRulz]

Hey look what I found :P #2198

[RetroEdit]

Hey look what I found :P #2198

Yep, I linked that in the original post a few days ago. 😄

Edit: Oh, it was originally titled 'The Play Movie dialog is slow'... I've been a bit bad about accidentally repeating my own issues recently, though it's usually been with different details. This one does have some different details. Oh, and I mentioned the double-loading issue that @Morilli recently fixed.