Riff Player

posted in programming by jon on 2008-09-22

People who know me probably know that I'm a fan of the 90's tv show Mystery Science Theater 3000, which consisted of a thinly-plotted excuse to make fun of bad movies.

The show has been off the air for several year, but several of the principles have kept the spirit of the show alive with various projects. One of these projects, called RiffTrax, involves the same crew creating commentary tracks making fun of modern movies. The idea here is that you sync up the commentary track with the dvd, and hilarity will (presumably) ensue. To help with the syncing part, they produce a free 'Riff Player' application that will attempt to keep the commentary in sync with the video. The problem is, it's Windows only, and it only works for actual DVDs, not bare video files. Since they didn't seem motivated to fix this, I decided to roll my own.

My version is written in python, using the pyglet library to render the video and draw the interface. Because pyglet use OpenGL to do all it's rendering, it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's already usable enough to satisfy most of what I want, including the ability to save and load sync points from a local sqlite database (using SHA1 hashes of the file data to hopefully prevent overlaps), and has separate volume controls for the riff and video tracks. To make it easier to collaboratively maintain a database of common sync points, I'm creating an appengine app that will eventually be checked for sync-data automatically.

Obligatory screenshot:

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