[comp.sys.mac.hypercard] Looking for Hypercard Videodisk Driver

mfidelma@bbn.com (Miles Fidelman) (04/18/88)

I recently acquired a copy of a hypercard stack for driving videodisk
players.  Unfortunately one of the XCMD resources is apparantly missing, the
one I need! The XCMD contains a driver for a Sony 1500 videodisk player.
If anyone out there has a copy, would you BinHex it and email it to me. If
anyone has a driver specifically for a Sony 1000A player, that would be
even better.

Thanks very much,

Miles Fidelman
mfidelman@bbn.com

KJELD%MCOPN1@eg.csc.ti.com (04/27/88)

> I recently acquired a copy of a hypercard stack for driving videodisk
> players.  Unfortunately one of the XCMD resources is apparantly missing, the
> one I need! The XCMD contains a driver for a Sony 1500 videodisk player.
> If anyone out there has a copy, would you BinHex it and email it to me. If
> anyone has a driver specifically for a Sony 1000A player, that would be
> even better.

When we did the presentation system for the DoI we found the same problem.
Apple in D.C. and in Dallas had the video stack, but the Sony drivers were
conspicuously missing from both.  As a solution, you might want to look at the 
HyperTerm stack which contains generic drivers for the serial ports.  Then
write scripts that act as a shell around these XCMDs and XFCNs.  You can have 
more flexibility here since you can fake playing a long segment by sending a
"play" command, and monitoring progress via. an Idle handler.  This way the
player won't be locked into playing a sequence, and can be interrupted at any
time.  Also it returns control to HyperCard before the video sequence is
complete.

I can be reached at:  Kurt Christensen
                      Apeiron
                      P.O. Box 1000, M/S 220
                      McKinney, TX  75069

ns@CAT.CMU.EDU (Nicholas Spies) (04/28/88)

The Sony 1500 videodisc driver is faulty, or at least does not correspond
very well with the Sony 1000A and 2000 commands. I rewrote it so it
basically works and could provide it either in MPW Pascal source form and/or
as a compiled resource. Send mail if interested. BTW, the way to play
a video segment without polling to find end is to repeat from current
position to end frame _once_ on Sony players. Pioneer players have an
explicit command to "play til..."

-- 
Nicholas Spies			ns@cat.cmu.edu.arpa
Center for Design of Educational Computing
Carnegie Mellon University