Play Movie/Audio nodes do not work in subcompositions

Bug Reports
1

Steps causing the bug to occur

  1. Edit a subcomposition
  2. Insert play movie node, or play audio file node.
  3. Run composition.
  4. Trigger nodes.
  5. Nothing happens.

Have you found a workaround?

I messed around with this for a while but can’t figure it out. Could be something to do with “updating paths” etc? However this doesn’t explain why new nodes added still will not play.

Other notes

  • Vuo version: 2.3.0
  • macOS version: macOS 10.14
  • CPU: x86_64
  • How severely does this bug affect you? It’s annoying but I can work around it.
2

We were able to create and modify the enclosed subcomposition without noticing a problem. Could you let us know if this works for you? If this doesn’t help you, please attach the composition(s) you are having problems with.

movie-player-subcomposition.zip (511 KB)

3

Hi, the subcomposition you attached works fine.

I think the bug has something to do with the paths? Not sure

The following sequence never fails to produce this bug for me:

  1. New composition
  2. Add any node. For example “share value”
  3. Select this node and package as subcomposition
  4. Vuo asks to save composition first - save as “test123” (or any file name)
  5. Vuo now asks: save subcomposition to local library - save as “test123” (or any file name)
    ~ Now we are editing the subcomposition.
  6. Drag and drop a video file into this subcomposition.
  7. Select add “play movie node”
  8. launch subcomposition (play)
  9. fire play movie node
  10. check node output - nothing  
4

Thanks for clarifying, @video_piglet. We can now reproduce the problem.

When you drag the Play Movie node onto the subcomposition, the path automatically added to the URL port is relative to the top-level composition. If you run the top-level composition, it plays the movie successfully. But if you run the subcomposition, it’s looking for the movie in a different place (relative to the subcomposition, which is in the Modules folder) and not finding it. We’re examining how to improve Vuo’s handling of relative paths.

One workaround would be to temporarily add ../ at the beginning of the URL port value when you run the subcomposition (and remove it when you run the top-level composition). For example, if you have a video called movie.mov in the same folder as the top-level composition, the original URL port value would be movie.mov and you’d temporarily change it to ../movie.mov.

Another workaround, if you only need to run the composition on your own computer, would be to use an absolute path instead of a relative path in the URL port. When you drop the video file onto the composition, hold down the Option key to get an absolute path.