Homemade Electron video player - fast playlists from local files
It has been an awfully long time while since I last wrote here. I am still alive and well.
In the recent years, I’ve been doing a couple of things :
- Mainly working as freelance motion designer (see portfolio to learn more).
- Developing for a few years and ultimately abandoning the development of Hyle.
- And, for the last two years, building a product called Dovi.
- Also, I still write some quick tips on keyframed.tv from time to time.
I usually give details about those projects on their respective spots of the Internet or, I just lazily tweet about it.
This article is an expanded version of one of those lazy tweets. Over the years, while working on Dovi, I got to learn how to tinker with Electron. I love it. It’s still very recent and somewhat hard to debug, but it’s a pretty cool tool. So, I got together a small app that would give me the option to:
- Watch a folder full of local video files as a Youtube or iTunes auto-playing list
- Control the playback speed
- Remember the file I was watching last time
Why?
I love video tutorials. I think visual and audio explanations are the best way to learn something new.
Using text is useful for quick tips and precise information, but as soon as the scope of the training grows, a video is just better. For this reason, I watch a lot of videos. About 3D, drawing, coding, audio, motion design, etc. I often download lots of tutorials from Youtube and Vimeo using Youtube-dl to watch them in a batch.
But there’s one thing.
Every. Single. Video. Is. Too. Slow.
I get distracted quickly and can’t focus on most of these videos. But at 1.75x to 2x? Perfect flow.
When some videos are slower than other, no biggie. Bring it up to 3x or 4x. Blast it into your brain like you’re Neo learning Kung Fu.
Disclaimers
- It is a personal project duck-taped together over a night of coding. It has been created to fix a particular issue of mine.
- It’s untested on Windows, and I am pretty sure it won’t work.
- If you want to use it, you’ll have to run it from the command-line. Follow the instructions on Github, it’s pretty straight-forward. At some point, I’d like to package it into a real functional .dmg, but electron-forge gives me a hard time when I try to package it. Any help would be welcome here.