Wonderful job MJ!
I realize this is the alpha version and there are bound to be some issues...
I have these questions and observations:
Is there a way to make additions or changes on the fly?
If I "add to schedule" in manager or reload in the controller it affects the current output until everything is back in sync (about 10 or 12 seconds) not a big deal but still a disruption to the program out.
Also, is there a glitch in following the entire path to a file?
My files are not always found even though they are there, the error message only shows about 3/4 of the entire path (even though they are fully listed in the scheduler, also seems to be the same files every time but they load fine as inputs in vMix)
Is there a way to loop or repeat the schedule? As I see it now, it seems to be a glorified form of the playlist although I might not have a complete understanding of the scheduler's current functionality.
but I must say I am very impressed with what you have done.

Ice

Thank you for your feedback!

The output-disruption when you update the schedule can be fixed, this happens when you add a clip that is already running, i should find a way to detect this. As a workaround, until i fix this, you can simply delete the already running clip from your schedule and adjust the starting time.

The problem with "&" in the filenames is caused by the way that vMixControl and vMix communicate through web-api-calls (the ampersand is a delimiting character, breaking the filename there). I guess also other critical characters could break the filename transmission, maybe i can escape those chars, but i'll have to see if vMix understands it then.

macjaeger,

You should be able to use standard URL encoding to escape any conflicting characters.
For example the URL encoding for & is %26

?Function=AddInput&Value=Video|c:\test%26video.avi

Would escape the filename c:\test&video.avi

Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

EDIT: (if you add a reference to System.Web to your .NET APP you can use this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us....urlencode(v=vs.80).aspx)

Regards,

Martin
vMix

@Martin:
Thank you for stating, what should have been obvious to me ;-) Actually i tried replacing the ampersand with %26, but i only tested this in firefox', and when it didn't work there i didn't pursue the idea any further. I don't know why it didn't work in firefox, but it surely works with .net webclient. I took your advice an added UrlEncode to all filenames.

@Ice:
Alpha v3 shouldn't interrupt the output any longer on reload or updates when the event for this moment is the same (in terms of title, path, start and end times) as the event currently running. Please make sure you didn't change any of the four elements, especially not the start or end times accidently. I'll think about a better way to handle this issue, but until v10 my options are limited.


That's vMix. When you have no inputs loaded (input 1 & 2 "Blank"), the first clip you load is sent to output window immediatly (although not started). If you want to avoid this, add at least a dummy (Colour->black) before you load the first clip.

@ macjaeger
Certainly some weird behaviors going on that I'm sure are unintended...
I would expect the next input in the queue to load into preview at the predetermined time (default 5 seconds)as it does in your demo video, but this is not happening for me, it is mere milliseconds and hardly noticeable.
Having "dummy" inputs also exhibits strange behaviors when using "operator" or "blackness" events.
In my case I loaded a preset of 8 colour inputs, upon loading the controller with a schedule having either of those events in them immediately removes the 1st input of my preset.
Blackness.jpg inputs are not closed out after playing out but rather the next preset input at the front of the queue is closed, in other words, a preset profile of 8 inputs is reduced to 7 blackness.jpg inputs after playing a schedule that has 7 or more blackness events, it would seem they begin to close out once there are no other inputs to close (perhaps some sort of hierarchy of input relevance???)

Could you please explain what kind of "crash" you experience? Is there any error message? There's hardly any change between v0.3.0.0 and v0.3.0.1 - the only thing i added was a call to "UrlEncode", which shouldn't change the game much. For the record: which version of .net do you have installed?

As for the other "strange behavior" you experience: could it be that you are running two instances of vMixControler by accident? Obviously something is interfering with the order of inputs in vMix.

Background information:

At the moment - meaning: vMix v9 - there is only one way of telling vMix which input to close, that is by number. But the input numbers can change whenever you add or remove inputs! Therefor vMixControler has to perform two steps for closing an input: first it has to retrieve status information from vMix to find out what number corresponds to a specific videoclip. Then it has to tell vMix to close the input identified by that number. If the numbers change between these two steps vMix will close the wrong input... But the only way the numbers could change are either user interference (like adding / closing inputs while vMixControler is active) or some other application trying to control vMix concurrently, e.g. another vMixControler instance. Usually the two actions mentioned before happen so quickly after each other that no user action should happen in between; but another instance of vMixControler would act on the same schedule and thus try at exact the same moment, so one of both instances would be mislead.

This will change when vMix v10 is available, because then each input can be identified reliably - at the moment i'm running an unelegant workaround.

Even if you don't see vMixControler running: after a crash there could be background tasks still active (vMixControler is running several threads)! Please look into your tasklist if you find any vMixControler.exe left over!

By the way: thank you for testing vMixScheduler! Only a handfull of willing testers can find all the strange glitches in programm!

The idea of vMixScheduler is to superseed vMix' own playlist feature, so why would you like to schedule files here and there? I could make vMixControl start the playlis (eg. add an option "start playlist after last event"), but it would only start it from the beginning, because there's no way for vMixControl to find out where the playlist was stopped before. Would that be helpfull?

If i only understood what you want to say... sorry, i'm no english native.

I understand there is an error - what error? Who says "error", vMix or my scheduler? And when does this error occur? What can i do to reproduce the error? I only can cure what i can diagnose.

You can add a number of videos at once, just hold ctrl or shift when you add videos in vMixManager. If it doesn't work, you might need the latest version, at the moment that's v0.3.0.1 (link is somepost above this one).

It doesn't just say "error", does it? I haven't built in a function that just says "error", yet the error-message is probably from windows itself. I figure there will be some more text in this message, could you please take a screenshot or copy&paste the complete error-message?

You can schedule a whole week already, just create a xml-file for each day (selecting the proper start time and date), and press "add to schedule" for each. This will be a very long schedule file / list, but it _should_ work (i actually haven't tested more than 100 events).

I can imagine a number of different ways to organize scheduling; but it may be best if you describe how you would like the scheduling to work.