ascii video player

This is an attempted at making an ascii video play for Computer-craft. The basic format for the video is

movie/format
movie/frames

In the frames file make each frame as it should be displayed (new lines and all) and for each frame put <new frame> on a line separating the two frames. You can also put <change rate #> to change rate to #.

In format you will have to define:to loop forever or not, the amount of time between frames, and the width/height.

Sample video is now nyancat. Just put it on the computer you run the program on.

shell.run( "movie/format" )
local w,h = term.getSize()
while loop do
local sPath = shell.resolve( "movie/frames")
tLines = {}
if fs.exists( sPath ) then
local file = io.open( sPath, "r" )
local sLine = file:read()
shell.run( "clear" )
line = 0
while sLine do
local startX = math.floor( (w - vw) / 2 )
local startY = math.floor( (h - vh) / 2 )
if sLine == "<new frame>" or string.find(sLine, "<change rate ") then
if string.find(sLine, "<change rate ") then
newrate = string.gsub(sLine, "<change rate ", "")
newrate = string.gsub(newrate, ">", "")
rate = newrate * 1
end
line = 0
sleep(rate)
	   else
		term.setCursorPos(startX, startY + line)
term.write( sLine )
line = line + 1
end
sLine = file:read()

end
file:close()
end
end
shell.run( "clear" )

Cool!

As poorly as this is set up (storing each frame in its own file?!), I'd say this may be verging on malicious. There's a reason the included ASCII movie keeps its frames inside the program file.

Lyqyd, on 02 October 2012 - 01:36 AM said:

(storing each frame in its own file?!)

Good point. I fixed that now.

Lyqyd, on 02 October 2012 - 01:36 AM said:

As poorly as this is set up (storing each frame in its own file?!), I'd say this may be verging on malicious. There's a reason the included ASCII movie keeps its frames inside the program file.

I think that's just a bit of an exxageration, don't you?

That's some pretty hefty unnecessary IO load. Depending on the rate (let's say 30Hz), you're looking at thirty different hard drive seeks per second, for extremely tiny files (sub-sector). One minute of video would be 30 * 60 frames, or 1800 tiny individual files. An animation that's much longer and you start getting into ridiculous quantities of tiny files. So, no. I don't think it's entirely in the realm of the benign. Perhaps not malicious as such, but the code is (was?) not good code.

It's far better to store each frame in a table in a single file and then simply display each frame of the table.