I recently stumbled upon an SO question that pointed at using WinRT (discontinued in Python 3.10), that helps handle Windows Runtime APIs. I wanted to use it to develop a basic desktop overlay that shows a list of currently running audio sources (primarily, Spotify). I did accomplish everything else, concering the UI and such, using tkinter.
The main problem is that the support for Python WinRT discontinued for the 3.10 version, (and onwards), and I can not find libraries that might substitute it. The main solutions I find include downgrading to Python 3.9 (or, using a venv, which sounds better), or just using a community fork (PyWinrt), but I'm not really putting these hacks or workarounds at a priority, I might be willing to opt for these if there is no other possible solution.
Is it still possible to develop such an overlay using only Python? Since I'm using Tkinter, all i would need is an image of the current playing track, the application that is running it, progress in the audio (in ms or s), and the name of the track. Keeping it simple, I'm trying to avoid audio control, such as skipping the track, or changing the relative timestamp.
I did try using the Spotify WebAPI to specifically grab info related to the track currently playing, but the work involved with refresh oauth tokens, and creating logins for just looking at the track seems a bit much work, since I believe it would be easier done natively; plus, what I'm trying to aim for, is a general purpose audio source info, rather than just Spotify.
Here, is a picture of Windows' Gamebar, that shows what I'm trying to achieve:
GamebarOverlay.
Related
I've been looking for ways to make a GUI with a .py file, and have so far only found frameworks and modules like Tkinter. However, my ultimate goal is for this code to run on a lot of computers that don't necessarily have these modules installed. The machines are only guaranteed to have Python on them. Does anyone know a way to make a GUI under these restrictions?
The best way to do this would be to ship your application with those modules as a part of it; the user's computer doesn't need to have the GUI framework installed if you provide it.
What you're asking would essentially require you to write an entire GUI framework, which would give a result that would be similar or worse - with a LOT more work.
I'm planning to take a non-GUI Linux distro (no Gnome, KDE, etc) and build my own front-end GUI for it. While I have a few years of Python programming experience, I have never attempted to do something quite like this.
To be more specific about my project, I'm building a CarPC and I have everything pretty much worked out so far, except the front-end. Most pre-existing front-ends for CarPCs run on Windows and the ones that run on Linux are hard to find (they either quit development or only run on specific hardware). My front-end will always be full-screen and I do not want to run a desktop environment unless I absolutely have to; it would just slow down the boot time and provide unnecessary features.
My question is basically where I should start. What Python graphics libraries are out there that would allow me to build a front-end GUI without a desktop environment?
You'll probably want to look at other answers and questions on this topic such as this one
Another good link is this one on the Python websitewhich lists different GUI toolkits.
While I haven't used it, Kivy looks like a good place to start. It's apparently got touch screen capabilities which I assume you would use and it doesn't look constrained to a GUI desktop env.
Hopefully you can find a way to do this without a desktop env. If not perhaps consider using X11 as your layer and go from there.
You should probably consider DirectFB. You can even use a DE on it if you like (although not required).
WxPython is awesome. I use it with Python and plain WxWidgets in C++ too. I've had great luck with making native GUIs from it and internationalization is supported too. Good luck!
Edit: I missed the "without a desktop environment bit". I'm not sure my answer is relevant. You should edit the Title of the question. Just disregard.
I have this question in my head for over a year now. And I guess you guys may have the answer.
In some Python GUI app, I need to display a video stream.
I need to record some part of this stream to reread it later.
Moreover, I need to make this python application multi platform (OSX, GNU, Windows)
I am open to many solutions :
Connect the camera to a stream and read the stream with the python app. (RTP + VLC could do the trick)
Use Phonon to read the camera
Create an abstract class to define differents reader and use Quicktime, Win32 or GStreamer in function of the OS.
What is your experience, what would you use to do that ?
I've looked into this periodically as well, and it seems the complexity of the underlying task is just too high to have a simple shortcut abstraction library for your topic question. I would suggest using pyopencv for the specific task you articulate, however. It has a class for webcam input/capture which works across platforms and has a reasonable user-base, in python, posting examples. The latest is 2.3.1 and quite recent. You can get a windows version of it, compiled for you, on the unbelievably helpful site (not mine, just saying):
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/
Since you ask for experience with a few libraries, I'd say: gstreamer worked for me on linux but was a huge pain to setup on windows and didn't work for me. This was quite some time ago and perhaps it's working better now. vlc.py is a simple library to test and see whether vlc would work for you. It doesn't work on 64 bit windows platforms at the moment; not sure why, but it seems many have reported similar errors, so it depends on how much cross-platform support you need.
Unfortunately, this is not easy to do. I've written most of a program that does video recording/playback on the 3 major desktop OS's. The state of video playback/recording in a "out-of-the-box" way is still unsolved for cross-platform, other than HTML embedding. This has a lot to do with the fact that:
Codecs are proprietary
OS's don't support common codecs
ffmpeg and similar projects have licenses that require you to release your source code if you include them in certain ways
A lot of the video playback players that exist are each rewritten by hand to handle each frame, buffering, streaming, audio sync'ing, and the like.
So you can go with HTML, or you can suffer through the cross-platform issues with the following coding libaries:
Python mplayer
Python vlc
Python opencv
Python pyaudio
Python pyside/pyqt phonon or qtmultimedia
Once you get it working on one development machine, expect it to break when it comes to installation on the end-user machine (distribute via: pyinstaller / appdmg / apt / chocolatey / Inno Setup )
On OSX, brew still has a lot of issues with this, but macports works better (I still had to do a lot of patching)
Linux is by far the easiest.
Windows is in-between the to as far as difficulty
I'd be eager to hear how iOS / Android / Windows RT / Kindle are
The problem is not unique, as even Netflix has yet to have a cross-platform video app: https://www.quora.com/Is-Netflix-building-an-app-for-the-Mac-App-Store?share=1
Hey there, everyone. A really random question, but I'm looking to get into some GUI programming with Python, specifically with the PyGTK library. I've only ever done GUI programming with Java/Swing, and I'd like to do some independent, personal projects in Python as a way of learning my way around the language, since it's been something that I've wanted to do for a really long time now, and haven't been able to find time for! But I digress...
I'm a fan of the Ribbon Interface introduced by Microsoft. I know that Microsoft introduced recently a library for .NET allowing users to build programs utilizing Ribbon. While I don't really want to learn IronPython yet, it's still an option for the future. These projects would be build on Linux, specifically Ubuntu, if that makes a difference.
So, finally, my question is this: Is there a library or reference point anywhere that can show me how to build a Ribbon GUI interface? Thank you for all of the advice!
There is ribbon like widgets developed as a part of GSC.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/08/mono-developer-brings-the-ribbon-interface-to-linux.ars
http://mono-soc-2007.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/laurent/src/Ribbons/
http://debackerl.wordpress.com/2007/08/25/soc-ribbons-summary/
I'm trying to write my own media player (like Foobar), and I'm having trouble tracking down a Python library that'll play MP3s. I know Pymedia does mp3s, but it looks outdated - the latest installer is for Python version 2.4, and I'm using 2.6. I've never had much success with Pygame, and Pyglet doesn't look like it has too much in the way of documentation. Are there any other alternatives?
There is http://pyglet.org/ and also have you tried http://code.google.com/p/mp3play/? It's also available from PyPi (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mp3play/) However, I think mp3play is Win32 only for now.
Looking at the updates, there were commits within last couple of months.
I've been using PyMedia in Python 2.6.5 on Windows successfully. Caveats: the documentation is bad and wrong -- many of the tutorials have glaring errors or otherwise don't work -- so I had to do some experimentation and Googling to get my code to work right. Also for whatever reason the maintainers seem to have stopped updating the project site 4 years ago, though they seem to be actively doing something.
I found installers here:
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/
The semi-active forum linked from their website includes some code maintainers who are semi-helpful. I'm jboyd99 if anyone is looking for tips.
For reasons that are beyond me the focus is on car audio systems, despite the fact that it is a fairly fully featured library that does some things no other free Python library does, like read MP3s into raw PCM data. The library has some flaws -- I'll probably use PyAudio or PyAudiere for actual playback for better control of synchrony issues.
Maybe it'd be simpler to write that part of your application in Python 2.4 as a separate "backend". This way you could use PyMedia (http://pymedia.org/) (as you mentioned) for the actual playback. It'd allow you to write your GUI in another Python version (like 2.6), which would also mean more decoupling of program components and parallelism (smoother GUI).
If you target only the Windows platform, then using Media Player via COM might help:
http://www.daniweb.com/code/snippet216465.html