iTunes movie on one screen, name of movie on other

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hi.

I’m new to scripting and started trying to learn it specifically to do the following:

I want to make an application that can play a specific iTunes movie playlist on one display (a 72" Plasma screen) and show the name, filmmaker, and possibly other attributes in white text on a black background on a 20" computer monitor next to it.

I’ve figured out how to play movies from a playlist in iTunes and get the name of an attribute (name is all I’m working with for now and so far I can display it in a dialog box) and make the movie play full screen:

tell application "iTunes"
	activate
	tell playlist "Smart all movies" to play some track
	set the_Name to name of current track
end tell
delay 2
tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTunes" to keystroke "f" using command down
display dialog the_Name

What I can’t figure out so far:

  1. How to make iTunes display the movie full screen on the large monitor without blacking out the small monitor.

  2. How to make the name of the movie and the artist display on the smaller monitor. All I can think of here is to put it in a Powerpoint presentation and play it, but that seems needlessly complicated.

I had also thought of doing this with Quicktime, but I need to build something that others can use easily without any applescript experience and iTunes seemed like a good way to go, since I could just supply an application corresponding to each of say, ten playlists and then the user could just populate those playlists with the desired movies and run the corresponding application.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

  • Bruce
#2

Hi,

I’m very sorry

  1. in full screen mode not at all

  2. Not at all with plain AppleScript (neither with AppleScript Studio)

A PowerPoint or Keynote presentation could be a solution

#3

Any other ideas on how I could do this?

Quicktime on one screen and Keynote on the other?

It seems that the difficulty then would be in getting the text from the annotations in Quicktime into the Keynote (or Powerpoint) document. I’d rather not have to create a separate presentation for each list.

Thoughts?

  • Bruce
#4

The presentation mode can only be activated by one single application.
I guess, the whole thing is only possible by writing an application in Objective-C using the QTKit API

#5

What about setting the bounds of the window of the application displaying the text so that the borders are off the screen? Then Quicktime could still be in full screen. Do you think that could work?

Thanks,

  • Bruce
#6

I don’t think so, setting the bounds to whatever doesn’t hide the menu bar