Hide / Remove "Video is loading..." message.

[daphatmac]

We've been working with one of our customers to provide a tailored digital signage solution which until now has simply consisted of a set of stills in a slideshow. Our customer has now asked us to upgrade to a video based solution instead, which through a combination of PHP, Javascript, CSS and some other bits and pieces, we've put together. Our only remaining problem is that the machines we're using to run the presentation are Mini-ITX machines and consequently quite slow - this means that while the videos load and play OK, the "Video is loading..." message displays for at least a second which, apart from looking really dodgy, is quite irritating and unprofessional in this particular application.

Does anyone have any idea how to either mask this message or remove it completely. We're happy to have just a blank canvas in between loads, but would love to get rid of the loading message. We've tried various Javascript and CSS hacks but just can't seem to make it happen. This is fairly urgent as we're on a budget and time is of the essence.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!

[revolunet]

compile your own activex with your own background image ?
or tweak the javascript to hide the vlc window until video is launched ?

Php, Javascript, CSS + VLC plugin seems a tricky choice to me for a digital signage solution !

[daphatmac]

Hey - thanks for your reply and yeah - I looked into recompiling the plugin, but I just don't know enough about compilers and the like to do that unfortunately. I also tried tweaking the JS code to hide the player until playback began, but because I'm using a 500ms timer to detect the end of the videos (which I need to do, to make our custom playlists work), that throws out any extra JS calls to hide the player. In other words, by the time the JS has hidden the player, to mask the message, the next video has already loaded - I know it sounds weird and you're probably right about the technologies we've used, BUT the requirement from our customer were to have a full PC and 22" LCD monitor to display the advertising with hourly synchronizations to our media server here for under AUD$600 (that's about US$400 odd)

To accomplish that we've gone Open Source with a light Debian install and VIA mini-itx machines, which barely handle 1024x768 resolution. That combination of factors means that the lightness of PHP and JS with the robustness of the VLC plugin makes it a fairly stable system. In fact, the existing solution we have in place now, which is almost identical, except that it only displays still JPEG images, has an average uptime of around 8-10 months per node.

Our next rollout will probably be on Intel Atom Mini-ITX pcs which will open the door for flash based solutions, but right now I just doon't have the powerrr cap'n...

P.S. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that V1.0 of the plugin will allow some changes in this area ...

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I think 1.0.0 changed that message...

[daphatmac]

Here's hoping - do we have a firm release date & will it include the plugins as well as the main VLC app?

[SirFredman]

We've got the same problem here. We use the Mozilla plugin to play movies in a similar digital signage solution, and the 'waiting for video' message is really annoying as it is only showed fo a second. A simple black screen would be a lot nicer...

I didn't see any config flags to disable this message in the new 1.0.0 version, but it would be a very nice feature to have!

[thannoy]

I think vlc 1.0.0 change this message too.
But for sure you will be able to set it dynamically on mozilla-plugin 1.1.0 (on master, using "text" plugin property) in which there is no text as default.