Script to play random movie file

Nonc · 11-25-2007, 10:58 AM

hi,

i would like to write/have a script that i can run that randomly picks a file and plays it. Im not bothered what language it uses.

id like to be able to have a list where i put in the names and respective players of the file and then it randomly chooses one and starts to play it. it could even just randomly choose a command, where the command is to start the file.

can someone point me to a tut that will have the stuff on how to do it, or if you want you can write it, i imagine its not too difficult.

cheers
nonc

indeliblestamp · 11-26-2007, 03:58 AM

I wrote a silly shell script once that does something similar: pick a random picture from a folder and set it as the wallpaper.
If you just replace picture with movie, and run mplayer instead of bsetbg or whatever, you could pretty much do the same for your need.
This is the script that I wrote:

Code:

    #!/usr/bin/bash
    #randwall.sh: Randomly sets wallpaper each time it’s run

    #Count how many images are there in my folder..
    WCOUNT=`ls -1 ~/pictures/recent/* | wc -l`;

    #Generate a random number within that range..
    num=$[ ( $RANDOM % $WCOUNT ) + 1 ];

    #Pick up that particular image..
    MYPIC=`ls ~/pictures/recent/* |sed -n ‘ ‘$num’p ‘`;

    #and set it as the wallpaper!
    bsetbg $MYPIC;

So fiddle around with it until it does what you need. e.g you can run it inside a while [ 1 ] loop so that it picks the next random movie once the first one is done, etc. Check out tldp's bash guides for more tips. http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html

cetialphav · 11-26-2007, 10:22 AM

Here is a Tcl script that I use to do something similar. It grabs a random file out of the current directory and plays it with mplayer.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/tclsh

proc lrandom L {lindex $L [expr {int(rand()*[llength $L])}]}

set fileList [glob *]
set f [lrandom $fileList]
puts "Playing $f"
exec gmplayer $f &