weshinsley / qmp

Quick Media Player - A JavaFX based media launcher for live settings

QMP

Quick Media Player - A JavaFX based media launcher for live settings

Introduction

The need for this came about when streaming church services during lockdown. It turned out surprisingly difficult to drag a media player into the right place on an extended desktop, maximise it to fill the screen, and get it playing, in a professional looking way.

So that's what QMP helps with: it lets you build a list of media clips you may want to play, and launch each with a double click at a pre-defined location, scaled to a given size, in a border-less window.

I've been developing on Windows, but being JavaFX-based, hopefully it will work on other platforms, either out of the box, or with potential to fix up without too much pain (certainly compared to other movie player projects I tried to use.

It was written to an urgent deadline, so is untidy here and there, and there is low-hanging fruit for some quick-fixes if anyone fancies it. (eg, Hacktoberfest!)

Usage

• You'll need a Java Development Kit with JavaFX. My favourite is Azul's Zulu Java who offer builds for Windows, Linux and MacOS, in x86/x64/ARM flavours. I have been developing with Java 8 LTS. Or choose your favourite; in the end, I'd like a JavaFX capable javac on the command-line, in order to...

• Clone the repo, and run compile.bat or compile.sh for the extremely simple compile script. I know I should learn to use gradle or some such, but really, the effort for such a simple compilation is currently beyond my stamina.

• Use run.bat or run.sh to launch - again, very simple.

Main screen

• You can manage playlists (new, load, save/as) from the File menu.
• Add movies by dragging them from another window onto the list, or use the add button.
• Re-order movies (just for your convenience) with the up/down buttons.
• Remove movies from the list with the delete button.
• Play movies by doubling clicking them, or highlighting them and clicking the play button.
• The Play turns into pause while the movie plays, and turns into resume if you pause the movie.
• Left-most button rewinds a movie at any time.
• The stop button stops the movie and removes the movie window.

Settings

• Settings -> Screen Settings is the only option so far.

• Fairly simple - you can manually set the location and size of the video playind window (when it appears), or you can autodetect monitors, and pick a full-screen one.

Issues to fix:

See the issues list, or create new ones!

• Automatic check/install updates would be great, and fairly easy.
• There are issues with playing MOVs created with Apple devices, which sometimes can be fixed by renaming them to MP4...
• There are also codec issues with more recent Apple devices, which can be fixed with conversion through ffmpeg.
• There are no tests. Because I don't really know how to do this in JavaFX, so I am only doing human testing. This would be good to learn.

Known Issues I'm not sure how to fix.

• The interface on Windows supports dragging and dropping movies into the playlist - however this does not work if you run as administrator. Not sure exactly why you would, but perhaps this happens accidentally.

qmp's Issues

OK on screen detection fails to close window

But the values are still remembered...

Crashes on deselection

Deselecting the movie (control+click) does not update buttons, and then clicking on buttons throws an exception

Invalid character issues

If a filename contains a '&', then adding the file causes invalid XML and everything goes hideously wrong the next time you start up QMP. Maybe base-64 on the filename, and strip the bad chars out of the human-readable name when writing the XML

Terrible icons

The media player icons are terrible. Enough said.

Image icon on Screen choice

Screen choice image icon needs updating...
And images in README are out of date

Movie playing time

Think about showing elapsed/to go time of a movie in some way. Possibly controllable... this isn't (so far) meant to be a fully featured media player, but could do this if it doesn't clutter the interface too much

.MOV file not shown unless you rename it to .MP4

There's something funny about .mov files and JavaFX

Auto-updating

Something lightweight - pull NEWS.md from the public repo to see what the latest master version is. Shell to git pull and self-compile, since those dependencies already exist if you've got the repo so far.

Write README

And include in the readme that... drag and drop doesn't work if you run as administrator.
I will never get those 2 hours back.

Can scroll/click below the added items

You can stroll off the bottom of the list of files and reveal loads of empty lines, which you can click on, and it plays the last movie in the list. Shouldn't be able to do that