Movie Problems in LiveCode

stgoldberg at aol.com stgoldberg at aol.com
Sun Mar 29 11:51:35 EDT 2015


Thanks to Richard Gaskin and Jacqueline Gay for their thoughts on the current problem in creating standalones with referenced QT movies using LiveCode 6-7 on Mac. Richard and Jacqueline have through the years been helpful and generous in providing their expertise.

Here is a summary of what I find with trying to create standalones with referenced QT movies:

CREATING REFERENCED MOVIES USING LC ON MACINTOSH:

1. LiveCode 5 will show referenced Quicktime movies, including the ability to maintain relative paths in the LC movie player, so that the standalone can be distributed to other computers, whether Mac or Windows. 

2. LC versions 6 and above, however, will not allow relative paths, when creating with Mac. E.g. consider this hierarchy in a Mac stack that you want to convert to a standalone for distribution:

FOLDER
    MyMainstack.rev
    MEDIA
        MyMovie.mov

If you want to refer to the movie in the LC Quicktime player, with the idea of creating a standalone for distribution to other platforms, you would want to change the movie player’s absolute path to a relative path:

Media/MyMovie.mov 

However LC versions on Mac above LC 5 will not allow this.  There, if you open the LC movie player and change the absolute path in the LC movie player to the relative path in the filename field, then close the Property Inspector and immediately open it up again, you will find that LC has reverted to the absolute path!  Thus, you can’t create a standalone  with a referenced QT movie for distribution in the LC 6-7 series, since the movie path always resets the relative path to an absolute path. 

This problem is not resolved by unchecking “Always use absolute file paths for images” in the LC Preferences, or by putting the relative path into the “non-stack files” section of the Copy files sections of the Standalone Application Settings, or by setting the DontUseQT global property to false.  I also don’t see how setting the defaultFolder to the Documents folder would help in this situation either, where a person to whom the standalone is distributed would be unlikely to use the Documents folder.

THE BOTTOM LINE:  To created standalones with referenced movies on the Mac for distribution, you would do best, until the LiveCode team resolves the problem, to use a LC version not greater than 5.

CREATING REFERENCED MOVIES USING LC ON WINDOWS:

On Windows, LiveCode version 7.0 WILL maintain the relative path in its stacks and standalones, so you could create the standalone on Windows with LC > 5 and transfer the standalone to a Mac, where the movie will play.

Stephen Goldberg, President
Medmaster Publishing Co.
Prof. Emeritus
Univ of Miami Miller School of Medicine
www.medmaster.net




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