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 I know Pymedia does mp3s, but it looks outdated - the latest installer is for Python version 2.4, and I'm using 2.6.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
Related
How can I use an analog joystick in Python on Linux? I come from a C++ background, where I used joystick.h to read events from /dev/input/js[x]. Is there a python wrapper around this I can use, perhaps? I don't really want to have to use a huge library like pyGame or SDL?
This gist worked for me on Ubuntu 15.04 without modification.
There is evdev, It's only for Linux, and it seems to be able to do much more than just handling joystick. I've never tried it, though.
I spent some time looking for a library to only read joystick in a cross-platform way, but didn't find any, and I've ended up with pygame (only initializing joystick and event modules) in my projects.
Now (2016+) there's a new sufficiently multiplatform Python module called "inputs" that you can find on GitHub or install from Pipy
It can read joysticks, controllers, keyboards and mices and seems to offer a good support for all their features, including vibration where available.
This topic is in response to a problem I've been having getting Pygame to be set up correctly on my computer. I have Windows 7, Python 3.3 and "64-bit" Windows (now I know what a bit and a byte are, but I don't really understand the implications of having a "64-bit" computer) I'm proficient in Python but know nothing about binaries, dependencies, registries or other such internal/system-level structures; not that I'm not interested, but at the moment most of what goes on is essentially "over my head".
But anyway, with that said, the problem I've been experiencing is basically that I can't install pygame. I've been over several versions of the same question (on Stack Overflow and other places on the web), and I've attempted to install pygame countless times. Sometimes it seems to work fine until I attempt to use it (the installation appears to have been successful but Python gives me errors when I try to use pygame), or I get something about Python 3.3 not being in my "registry" (which from what I read appears to be another OS-level/internal structure for those who understand "the base code of the universe"). They could actually develop a series of tutorials on just the installation process. :)
But all joking aside, I am at a loss here and considering just giving up on pygame. So my question would be, is there any way to use what's already installed (Python's libraries etc.) to develop games? If not, do you know of any alternatives that don't require the same level of experience to install? I've Googled around but everything I've found about game design in Python leads back to pygame. Thanks in advance.
To save yourself pain, just use 32bit python, and 32bit pygame. If you mix 32 and 64 bit, it will not run correctly. That's probably the problem you're having.
Since you have python 3.3, you would use https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame/downloads/pygame-1.9.2a0.win32-py3.3.msi
You shouldn't have to edit the registry or your environmentvariables unless something goes wrong.
As mentioned previously, tkinter would offer a solution. For example, this was created in tkinter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHxLkNryOzI)
The pygame downloads page hasn't been updated for a while and is incompatible with python 3.x. Newer versions of pygame can be downloaded here.
I'd personally use pygame as there's audio support as well but tkinter could be used.
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
I'm not sure if I'm even asking this question correctly. I just built my first real program and I want to make it available to people in my office. I'm not sure if I will have access to the shared server, but I was hoping I could simply package the program (I hope I'm using this term correctly) and upload it to a website for my coworkers to download.
I know how to zip a file, but something tells me it's a little more complicated than that :) In fact, some of the people in my office who need the program installed do not have python on their computers already, and I would rather avoid asking everyone to install python before downloading my .py files from my hosting server.
So, is there an easy way to package my program, along with python and the other dependencies, for simple distribution from a website? I tried searching for the answer but I can't find exactly what I'm looking for. Oh, and since this is the first time I have done this- are there any precautions I need to take when sharing these files so that everything runs smoothly?
PyInstaller or py2exe can package your Python program.
Both are actively maintained. PyInstaller is actively maintained. py2exe has not been updated for at least a year. I've used each with success.
Also there is cx_Freeze which I have not used.
Take a look at http://www.py2exe.org/
I found http://www.iseriespython.com/, which is a version of Python for the iSeries apparently including some system specific data access classes. I am keen to try this out, but will have to get approval at work to do so. My questions are:
Does the port work well, or are there limits to what the interpreter can handle compared with standard Python implementations?
Does the iSeries database access layer work well, creating usable objects from table definitions?
From what I have seen so far, it works pretty well. Note that I'm using iSeries Python 2.3.3. The fact that strings are natively EBCDIC can be a problem; it's definitely one of the reasons many third-party packages won't work as-is, even if they are pure Python. (In some cases they can be tweaked and massaged into working with judicious use of encoding and decoding.) Supposedly 2.5 uses ASCII natively, which would in principle improve compatibility, but I have no way to test this because I'm on a too-old version of OS/400.
Partly because of EBCDIC and partly because OS/400 and the QSYS file system are neither Unix-like nor Windows-like, there are some pieces of the standard library that are not implemented or are imperfectly implemented. How badly this would affect you depends on what you're trying to do.
On the plus side, the iSeries-specific features work quite well. It's very easy to work with physical files as well as stream files. Calling CL or RPG programs from Python is fairly painless. On balance, I find iSeries Python to be highly usable and very worthwhile.
Update (2012): A lot of work has gone into iSeries Python since this question was asked. Version 2.7 is now available, meaning it's up-to-date as far as 2.x versions go. A few participants of the forum are reasonably active and provide amazing support. One of them has gotten Django working on the i. As expected, the move to native ASCII strings solves a lot of the EBCDIC problems and greatly increases compatibility with third-party packages. I enthusiastically recommend iSeries Python 2.7 for anyone on V5R3 or later. (I still strongly recommend iSeries Python 2.3.3 for those who are on earlier versions of the operating system.)
Update (2021): Unfortunately, iSeriesPython is no longer maintained, and the old website and forum are gone. You can still get the software from its SourceForge repository, and it is still an amazingly useful and worthwhile asset for those who are stuck on old (pre-7.2) versions of the operating system. For those who are on 7.2 or newer, there is a Python for PASE from IBM, which should be considered the preferred way to run Python on the midrange platform. This version of Python is part of a growing ecosystem of open source software on IBM i.
It sounds like it is would work as expected. Support for other libraries might be pretty limited, though.
Timothy Prickett talks about some Python ports for the iSeries in this article:
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh041706-story02.html
Also, some discussion popped up in the Python mailing archives:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-January/245276.html
iSeriesPython is working very well.
We are usning it since 2005 (or earlier) in our Development and Production Environments as an utility language, for generating of COBOL source code, generating of PCML interfaces, sending SMS, validating/correcting some data ... etc.
With iSeriesPython you can access the iSeries database at 2 ways: using File400 and/or db2 module. You can execute OS/400 commands and you can work with both QSYS.LIB members and IFS stream files.
IMHO, iSeries Python is very powerful tool, more better than REXX included with iSeries.
Try it!
I got permission to install iSeries Python on a box about 3 years ago. I found that it worked pretty much as advertised. I contacted the developer and he was very good about answering questions. However, before I could think about using it in production, I had to approach the developer regarding a support contract. That really isn't his gig, so he said no and we scrapped the idea. The main limitation I found is that it is several releases behind Python on other platforms.
I have also had very good experience with Jython on the iSeries. Java is completely supported on the iSeries. Theoretically, everything you can do in RPG on the iSeries, you can do in Java, which means you can do it in Jython. I was sending email from an AS/400 (old name for iSeries) via JPython (old name for Jython) and smtplib.py in 1999 or 2000.
Another place to look is on the mailing list MIDRANGE-L or search the archives for the list at midrange.com. I know they have talked about this a while back.