Assistance setting up specific playback queue re: features and short films

[cr08 6]

Long story made short I am working on a project for a potential future (personal) event and trying to nail down some of the final functional details involving CV. Mostly everything seems pretty straightforward. Been watching progress of CV off and on and really like what I see and the progress being made.

1) Is there an easy way for specific movie titles in my library to run two of them back to back with no intermission or bumpers in between and after those are done continue on as normal, potentially rolling through additional bumpers and intermissions and into other features? Reason for this is a few features in my library have some associated short film content (completely separate from CV's 'short films', these are currently acting as their own separate features in my movie library) that I'd like to run straight after those movies with no interruptions. Muxing/merging into a single video file is not an option due to differing audio codecs.

2) I have some short films I'd like to run as intermission videos but I'd like to run them in sequence if at all possible. They are episodic and named as such so I have 'Episode 01', 'Episode 02' and so on in those files. So after the first movie run Episode 1, then after the second movie and next intermission do Episode 2, etc..

Along the lines of those two, if it helps I'd also be perfectly willing to 'pre-build' my own playlist of all the segments CV would run through and specify which content to run for features/bumpers/short films but don't see an easy way to do so. About the only thing that would need to be left to CV's own functionality is the Trivia portion obviously.

On a side-but-unrelated note, I am also curious what people have come up with regarding cheap/inexpensive dimmable lighting that can be controlled through CV? Seems there's been a lot of cheap smart bulbs coming on the market lately but either proprietary software support or a proprietary wireless protocol necessitating their own hubs. One set of bulbs I have right now is the Sengled Element bulbs. Pretty cheap at $9 a pop for the basic 60W warm white dimmable versions. $40 gets you their hub and 2 of the mentioned bulbs. But sadly no third party software support other than Alexa/Google Home integration (is there any way to take advantage of this?). It does appear to be standard Zigbee but the cheapest option to integrate it into any third party software like OpenHAB appears to be a $50 Zigbee USB dongle on Amazon.

[Ragnarok 198]

On 3/18/2018 at 1:25 PM, cr08 said:

Long story made short I am working on a project for a potential future (personal) event and trying to nail down some of the final functional details involving CV. Mostly everything seems pretty straightforward. Been watching progress of CV off and on and really like what I see and the progress being made.

Thanks for the kind words! We're actively working on the 2.0 release which includes a total face-lift with some new interface customization options, and a ton of new of new features and optimizations.

On 3/18/2018 at 1:25 PM, cr08 said:

1) Is there an easy way for specific movie titles in my library to run two of them back to back with no intermission or bumpers in between and after those are done continue on as normal, potentially rolling through additional bumpers and intermissions and into other features? Reason for this is a few features in my library have some associated short film content (completely separate from CV's 'short films', these are currently acting as their own separate features in my movie library) that I'd like to run straight after those movies with no interruptions. Muxing/merging into a single video file is not an option due to differing audio codecs.

You're the first person to come to us with this use case, but it's certainly possible. While you won't be able to do what you want with the current Features Module (it doesn't allow you to specify your feature because we expected to play items from your queue to make your Sequence dynamic), you can use the Video Bumpers module to play your two movies back-to-back and then fill out the rest of your Sequence accordingly.

Your other option is to use the Conditional Sequences feature to tag the main Feature, and use that tag to trigger a custom Sequence with the associated short film content and any other content you want to use all built in.

On 3/18/2018 at 1:25 PM, cr08 said:

2) I have some short films I'd like to run as intermission videos but I'd like to run them in sequence if at all possible. They are episodic and named as such so I have 'Episode 01', 'Episode 02' and so on in those files. So after the first movie run Episode 1, then after the second movie and next intermission do Episode 2, etc..

Along the lines of those two, if it helps I'd also be perfectly willing to 'pre-build' my own playlist of all the segments CV would run through and specify which content to run for features/bumpers/short films but don't see an easy way to do so. About the only thing that would need to be left to CV's own functionality is the Trivia portion obviously.

You can do that with the Video Bumpers module. What you'll want to do is put the related intermission videos in their own directory, edit the settings of your Video Bumpers module, set Type to Directory, set Random to No, and set Count to the number of videos you want to play back-to-back.

We don't have full support for playlists built in, though that is coming.

On 3/18/2018 at 1:25 PM, cr08 said:

On a side-but-unrelated note, I am also curious what people have come up with regarding cheap/inexpensive dimmable lighting that can be controlled through CV? Seems there's been a lot of cheap smart bulbs coming on the market lately but either proprietary software support or a proprietary wireless protocol necessitating their own hubs. One set of bulbs I have right now is the Sengled Element bulbs. Pretty cheap at $9 a pop for the basic 60W warm white dimmable versions. $40 gets you their hub and 2 of the mentioned bulbs. But sadly no third party software support other than Alexa/Google Home integration (is there any way to take advantage of this?). It does appear to be standard Zigbee but the cheapest option to integrate it into any third party software like OpenHAB appears to be a $50 Zigbee USB dongle on Amazon.

CinemaVision can control anything that has an API that you can trigger. OpenHAB is a good example of that integration, and we have a guide for how to integrate CV and OpenHAB all ready for you. Actions are pretty easy to use, and can control things using scripts, web APIs, executables and a host of other ways. I've not seen anyone using Alexa or Google Home with CinemaVision, though I would imagine it's possible. My suggestion is to look for API documentation for the solution you're buying, and post it here for us to take a look at. We should be able to tell you if it will or won't work.