play player -- why does this work?
Devin Asay
devin_asay at byu.edu
Thu Mar 31 11:16:23 EST 2005
Okay, yesterday was a reality check for me. Since time immemorial, I
have believed that 'play player "myPlayer"' and 'start player
"myPlayer"' were synonymous. It may be a relic of using the old HC
QuickTime external, when you used 'play movie' to start playing an
external movie file. Regardless of the source, I have happily been
using play player, and teaching it to my students, since Rev 1.0
***BECAUSE IT WORKED***. Until this week. One of my students showed me
a weird problem where his movie would sort of start playing--it would
show a still frame of the beginning of the movie, plus pop up a text
track movie that contained the name of the player object in the center
of the stack window, which then would disappear. I couldn't figure out
what was causing this, and finally I resorted to the dictionary to
reread the play command entry, which I had read dozens of times. This
time it struck me: this command has nothing to do with player objects.
It is only the start command that pertains to playing movies inside
players.
I suppose this could all be considered a morality play on the dangers
of depending on old habits. ;-)
But now the question remains: Why does the play player form even work
at all? Does it somehow resolve the reference in the player object as a
virtual imported video file?
Confused,
Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University
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