VLC automation

[Ajit Teli]

I have pasted the perl script below. Here, I have stored audio files into the mysql database. the "print `vlc "@row"`;" statement launches vlc and starts playing. But it is not quitting after sleeping fot 10 sec. What do i need to do for that?

#!usr/bin/perl
use strict;
no strict "vars";
use warnings;

use DBI;
$dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:mysql:audio', 'root', 'ajitteli')
	or die "connection error: $DBI::errstr\n";

print "Enter the number of songs to be played:  ";
my $num = <stdin>;

for (my $i=1; $i<=$num; $i++) {
	$sql = "select file_path from audio_table where id like $i";
	$sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
	$sth->execute
		or die "SQL Error: $DBI::errstr\n";

	#use IPC::open3;

	# my %videoInfo = videoInfo($sth);

	# $durtn = $videoInfo{'durationsecs'};


	while (@row =$sth->fetchrow_array) {
		print "\n\nPlaying song $i\n\n";

		print `vlc "@row"`;
		print "song$i stopped\n";
		sleep 10;

		print `vlc://quit`;
	}

[Ajit Teli]

I am able to

Here vlc://quit is not working. What do i need to for quitting vlc through perl?

#!usr/bin/perl
use strict;
no strict "vars";
use warnings;

use DBI;
$dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:mysql:audio', 'root', 'ajitteli')
	or die "connection error: $DBI::errstr\n";

print "Enter the number of songs to be played:  ";
my $num = <stdin>;

for (my $i=1; $i<=$num; $i++) {
	$sql = "select file_path from audio_table where id like $i";
	$sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
	$sth->execute
		or die "SQL Error: $DBI::errstr\n";

	while (@row =$sth->fetchrow_array) {
		print "\n\nPlaying song $i\n\n";

		print `vlc "@row"`;

		print "song$i stopped\n";
		sleep 10;

		print `vlc://quit`;
	}

[miller]

I do not believe that you understand the nature of backticks ``. Read perlop, search for "qx/STRING/".

Backticks execute an external program but they will wait until it's done before returning the results. If you want to execute vlc.exe and not wait for it to end, you'll have to fork like the following

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Cwd qw(chdir);

use strict;
use warnings;

my $dir = q{C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC};
my $vlc = q{vlc.exe};
my $mp3 = q{C:\Dropbox\devel\intro.mp3};

chdir($dir);

my $pid = fork();

if (not defined $pid) {
    warn "resources not avilable.\n";

} elsif ($pid == 0) {
	exec $vlc, $mp3;
    exit(0);
}

sleep 10;

# attempt to kill vlc

waitpid($pid,0);

1;

__END__

Now how to kill vlc, I don't know. You'll have to determine the process id of it somehow and send the kill request.

- Miller

[miller]

Here is how you would kill each vlc instance on windows:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Cwd qw(chdir);
use Win32::Process::List;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $dir = q{C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC};
my $vlc = q{vlc.exe};
my $mp3 = q{C:\Dropbox\devel\intro.mp3};

chdir($dir);

my $pid = fork();

if (not defined $pid) {
    warn "resources not avilable.\n";

} elsif ($pid == 0) {
	exec $vlc, $mp3;
    exit(0);
}
END {
	waitpid($pid, 0);
}


for (1..5) {
	print "Hello $_\n";
	sleep 1;
}

my $P = Win32::Process::List->new();
my %list = $P->GetProcesses();
if (my @vlc_pids = grep {$list{$_} eq $vlc} keys %list) {
	print "@vlc_pids\n";
	kill 9, $_ for (@vlc_pids);
}

[RonB]

I'd use Win32::Process which provides methods for creating, suspending, and killing to name a few.

I don't have time to write an example, but the documentation is pretty clear.

http://search.cpan.org/~jdb/Win32-Process-0.14/Process.pm