I'm planning a rather large partay at my new house next week and basically want to have a continuous random shuffle of videos projected onto a wall, while a playlist plays at random.. ie. random music playing to random unassociated video clips..

i have tonnes of downloaded music videos, perfect in that they're ~4mins, but would also like to play parts of cult movies, and i have plenty of live music movies and other things that are much larger and longer, that would be good as well..

is it possible in way, to have a playlist of video's queued up (4min clips, 2hour movies etc) and for the playlist to play them at random, but for only a fixed period of time before skipping to the next? and even better, playing at a random spot? so if a movie comes on the playlist it will play at a random spot, eg. 35 minutes in and play for 5 or 6 minutes and move onto the next item in the playlist??

Que them into Winamp.. hit random and leave. Don't make it hard for yourself buddy ;)

The only way I know of to do that would be to chop up the movies manually ie. capture 4 min sections and save them as mpeg4 files etc then chuck em into Winamp and hit random (like Skitza said). Seems like an awful lot of work to go to just to get bits of movie footage.

You'll probably find that people won't really take that much notice. I would just load up a whole bunch of clips and be done with it.

It's the music that matters.

thats my point tho i have a limited number of nice neat 4min videos, i want to make use of all the 700meg concert videos etc that i have, if i queue what i want to in winamp; 4min video may play at random, another 4min video may play at random, then i hit a 2hour video file which............plays for 2hours... thats not what i want.

Well then you better get yourself a video editing prog and start cutting. Cutting 3-4 hours of 4 min clips outta movies you have on your HDD/DVD etc, I reckon you'll be ready to premiere your super video slide show spectacular about July next year.

if you know where your looking it should only really take 30 seconds to cut a 4min clip out in virtualdub.

Man give them some booze and a chair. The fun will sort itself out :)

yeh bit of a dream, was just hoping there was some media player that had such advanced playlist options i'm in need of..

i didnt want to go the video editing route obvs cause of time consumption.. i did try virtual dubbing it, but highlighting the section of video, and then saving it required it to encode the file during the save, took 4mins+ for a 4min clip of video.. never gonna work..

is there a way in virtual dub or any other program that you can just select start time and end time and it'll just splice it out and give u yr new video really quickly?

failing that, im just going to project the warriors onto the house behind mine, and leave an ipod out for people to f*** around with..

Grab a copy of pstools... http://www.sysinternals.com/Files/PsTools.zip
grab mplayer.. http://www.jrwr.netcessorhost.com/cvs/mplayer-cvs.2005.07.22.exe
generate a playlist file of the files you want to play using winamp
use the playlist file, whatever switches you need and -shuffle with mplayer and write a small batch file that kills mplayer.exe with pskill, then runs mplayer with a clip at random from your generated playlist, and finally pskills cmd.exe. Then make a scheduled task that runs this batch file from the time you want it to start, that repeats every 4 minutes. Task scheduler should therefore start the task, which will attempt to kill mplayer, then run it again and play a clip for 4 minutes, then repeat the cycle until whatever time you specified in the task.

Course knowing mplayer theres probably a way to do all that with just a few extra switches but I dunno what they are. Also thered be a little gap in between when mplayer is halted and started again, but it oughta be pretty short seeing as mplayer is pretty sleek.

Do we get an invite if we help?