Music Video / Visualization idea. . .

[sdsean]

I'm an engineer, and although I haven't tried my hand yet at creating plugin, I had an idea that I thought would be cool, but I wanted to get feedback from the community first before trying it. . .

My idea is. . . create a plugin that search's for a matching music video to go with the current song playing. . .(searching yahoo or whatever).

Then it would play the video on the screen, muting the video sound, and playing the audio from your track (assuming it found something).

If it doesn't find a video, then it just does a default visualization or whatever (album/artist artwork or whatnot).

There are some problems I can think of right away, but they seem solveable. . .

1.) Commericals from services that send video (MTV, FUSE, YAHOO, etc).
-- I think I should be able to detect when the video stream switches and run the default visulization while said commerical is playing. . .

2.) Which the next point is the time sync. . .obviously they are not going to play exactly in sync. That's ok, again it just plays from the start of the video (again skipping the commercials), and fills the end of the video (if its longer than the song playing) with default visuals or whatever. Again it just plays the audio from your lib, not the video. The point is just to have something cool on screen besides the status quo stuff we have now. . .

3.) Bad data, lots of matches, etc. . .
This will just be trial by error, figuring out what the best algorithm is and allow you some options to change it. . . I'd probably store the matches in some xml file so they could be tweaked, and again its just visuals so if you got wrong the first time, at least you'd still have somethign on screen. .

There's probably some crazy legal issues here that I'll have to avoid. . . but hey maybe it'll be good enough to strike a deal with a big corp sponsor ;-)

Let me know what you think. . .

[pjpjpjpj]

Thoughts:

At this point, I imagine your only chance would be youtube, since Sage doesn't (without a big hack) support streaming video otherwise. And an automated search within youtube for a video is just as likely to pull up some pre-teen singing the song into his webcam, rather than the actual video.

If you pulled in the HD version of the video, you could have issues with buffering mid-song... actually, even the SD version would require buffering for a few seconds before the video started, which means you would have big chunks of "dead air" between songs playing. In many cases, that would be more annoying than it's worth.

You'd also have issues when a video has a lead-in before the music starts... some sort of "storyline" intro. Which, now that I think about it, probably occurs in most videos.

And then there are the videos where the song stops in the middle, some storyline action occurs, and then the song resumes. Likewise, videos where there is some storyline action at the end, you would need to have it set up to just chop off the video end. Probably not hard, but it might annoy someone who was actually watching the video on your system (say if you were using the function during a party at your place).

Overall, this sounds like WAY more work that it would be worth, to cover all the possible issues. Honestly, I would be happy if we could just have the FanArt fill the the screen during each song - that would be a huge improvement over what we have now. But I suppose if you could get this working, I'd try it.

[sdsean]

The video stopping or lead in or whatever is irrelavant in terms of the feature. . .

Again you are not trying to keep the audio and video in sync, simply play a video. . .
If the video is longer or shorter that's fine, If its shorter then you just swap to the default visulization or whatever, and if its longer you just swap to the next video after the song is done. .

The idea is really just to have something playing on the screen that is somewhat interesting to look at while playing. ..

As far as streaming video. . .YouTube is just using flash, and Yahoo and MTV both are doing the same thing. .. the trick is gettining around ads/rudimentary security measures which really shouldn't be that hard. ..

But your're right in that there are definite issues. . . hell I'd settle for fan art and maybe just selecting some bg video. . .if I couldn't get it working at all. . .

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by sdsean

The video stopping or lead in or whatever is irrelavant in terms of the feature. . .

Again you are not trying to keep the audio and video in sync, simply play a video. . .
If the video is longer or shorter that's fine, If its shorter then you just swap to the default visulization or whatever, and if its longer you just swap to the next video after the song is done. .

The idea is really just to have something playing on the screen that is somewhat interesting to look at while playing. ..

As far as streaming video. . .YouTube is just using flash, and Yahoo and MTV both are doing the same thing. .. the trick is gettining around ads/rudimentary security measures which really shouldn't be that hard. ..

But your're right in that there are definite issues. . . hell I'd settle for fan art and maybe just selecting some bg video. . .if I couldn't get it working at all. . .

Sounds like it could be insteresting. You should give it a shot.

If you build it, they will use it.