Displaying Videos

Videos can be displayed in place of a message. When specified, the default Dialog size will switch to 900x600 to accomodate a 16:9 ratio video. Custom sizes can be specified using the --width and --height modifiers.

--video  <file> | <url>
  Display a video instead of a message.
  Videos will be resized to fit the available display area (depending on video resolution, some letterboxing may occur)

    --videocaption <text>
    Text that will appear underneath the displayed video.

    --autoplay
    Video will start playing automatically on launch without requiring the user to press play

Any video format supported by Quicktime should be viewable. If using a URL, the full path to the video resource must be used.

Example: --title "Video Demo" --video /Users/Shared/Videos/day4session3.mp4

YouTube and Vimeo support (requires swiftDialog v2.0 or newer)

To embed a YouTube or Vimeo video, you can pass in the video ID as a parameter to the --video command using the youtubeid= or vimeoid= prefix

The ID can usually be found in the URL on either YouTube or Vimeo

YouTube Example:

dialog --video youtubeid=XXXXXXXXXX

Vimeo example:

dialog --video vimeoid=XXXXXXXXXX

Note: for ID’s of private Vimeo videos, you may also need to capture the additional information in the embed URL. This will be represented as additional h=YYYYYYYY - the full embed command for swiftDialog would therefore be dialog --video "vimeoid=XXXXXXXXXX?h=YYYYYYYY".

Updating a running dialog with new web or video content

Send the following commands to update a dialog with new web or video content

echo "webcontent: https://some.website.com" >> /var/tmp/dialog.log
echo "video: https://some.website.com/video.mov" >> /var/tmp/dialog.log
echo "video: /path/to/file.mov" >> /var/tmp/dialog.log

Some caveats though: Currently you can’t update web or video content in place. To switch to another website you will need to clear the contents and then send the new content.

echo "webcontent: none" >> /var/tmp/dialog.log
echo "webcontent: https://some.new.website.com" >> /var/tmp/dialog.log

you can string those together though so echo "webcontent: none" >> /var/tmp/dialog.log && echo "webcontent: https://some.new.website.com" >> /var/tmp/dialog.log also works.