get input from keyboard while displaying an avi wi

Question

Hi all
I wrote a short program that displays an avi file. I need the program to get input from the keyboard while the movie is running (and not after it ends): this is my code:

figure('MenuBar','none')
set(gcf,'Color', 'white')
set(gca,'Color','white');
set(gca,'XColor','white');
set(gca,'YColor','white');
m=aviread('c:/t1.avi')
a=30:1:100;
b=100:-1:30;
c=[a b a b a b a b a b] %to run the movie back and forth
movie(m,c) %runs the movie

Thank you for any help
Ariel

Answer 1

Unless movie() has been designed to watch for input I think you will have to multithread, which from one of the other answers sounds a bit complicated.

You could play a short section of the video, then run come code to check for inputs and then play the next bit of the video. I'm not sure if you can count on things that the user types whilst the video plays going into the input buffer though.

Answer 2

the solution is to use winopen('c:/filename.avi')

winopen('c:/filename.avi')
this command opens media player and runs following commands in the matlab script. it doesn't wait for the movie to end. it runs in the background.
thanks every one
ariel

Answer 3

Maybe you can insert your video in an UIPanel (or another suitable GUI item) and use the KeyPressFcn callback. Have a look on this : Callback Sequencing and Interruption (I don't know if it can works but it's probably worth trying).

Answer 4

As far as I know multi-threading or parallel processing capabilities in MATLAB are limited; however it appears as there are remedies. This article describes combining MATLAB and C++ code, with use of MEX files.

Now I have to admit that I have never tried this so I can't really claim that it would work in your case, but it would be a good place to start.