ActiveX for Windows Movie Maker

[Extreme]

Hi,

We are from the NCS Lab, designing the control interface for a salinity sensor.

It needs to display a movie from generated frames. LabVIEW does a poor job in displaying the frames sequentially as a movie, so we need to use Windows Movie Maker to generate the movie for us.

We want the LabVIEW to use the program to automatically generate the movie from a set of frames. We think that it involves ActiveX, but we have no experience in it.



When we choose Select ActiveX class, we really don't know what class to choose from.

Do you think that LabVIEW can control the Windows Movie Maker to generate a movie from a set of pictures? Does it need a third-party ActiveX control?

Please give us some hints.

[Wiebe@CARYA]

I'd stay away from ActiveX if there is any change to get it working without
it. ActiveX in LabVIEW has so many disadvantages, it outweights the
advantages. Disadvantages: code depends on AX version, it's hard to program
without introducing memory leaks, it's hard to program in general, the
documentation is sparce and not for LabVIEW. Advantage: code reuse to reuse
all those fancy MS stuff.

I'd look for command line tools that do the same job. Mplayer (mencoder) can
do it (because it can do almost anything with video). See:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html . A windows
version is available (see http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ ). It's a great tool,
that I can really recommend. And it's open source.

I tried "C:\Program Files\MPlayer\mencoder.exe mf://*.jpg -mf
w=200:h=200:fps=25:type=jpg -ovc copy -lavcopts
vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell -oac copy -o output.avi" on a sysexec.vi with in
the working directory 50 jpg files generated by LabVIEW. I got a perfect AVI
file, with a mpeg4 encrypted movy in it. Got it working in 30 minutes. Just
be sure you make the w= and h= parameters the same as the jpgs.

But if you for instance google "jpg to avi command line" you'll probably
find a lot of tools that do the same as movie maker but better, and much
"leaner".

Regards,

Wiebe

[keeperC]

Hi Wiebe,

Thank you for answering our question. It really helps.

But we are having a problem with the sysexec.vi. It works when we use Command Line from Windows to execute the code, but the sysexec.vi takes the code as a wrong argument. (please see the attached pic). Also, there was a weird error message with "Full Memory".

NCS Lab

[Wiebe@CARYA]

Keeper,

Is the command line string a multi line string? It shouldn't be. I can't see
if it is a wrapped one line string, or a multiline string set to fit it's
size.

If that doesn't help, I'll post my code next week.

Regards,

Wiebe.