[MPlayer-users] mplayer && video && (at || cron)

[Jason Stechschulte]

I haven't been able to find any information on scheduling mplayer to
play a video using either cron nor at.  Since I cannot get it working,
I'm not sure if I am doing something incredibly stupid or if mplayer
cannot be used in this manner.

At work, we have televisions in different areas that are getting a feed
from a computer.  Normally we just have a slideshow playing.  What they
want to do is schedule a video to play full screen at some time in the
future.  So I thought 'at' would work great for this.

Mplayer is installed and working from the command line.  I can even
schedule audio to play.  I just can't schedule video.  Whenever I try, I
get this:

vo: couldn't open the X11 display ()!
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.

The above is a portion that is emailed to me courtesy of cron.  I've
tried specifying all of the vo's listed from -vo help to no avail.
Actually if I use something like -vo x11, it will play the audio and
create a bunch of images, so I'm guessing it is falling back on -vo png
and working.

Is this just a linux issue and not an mplayer issue?  I've tried setting
cron to run a bash script that sets a bunch of environment variables,
but if that is what I need to do, I haven't found the right ones to set.
If someone can point me in the right direction, I would really
appreciate it.

I'm running Fedora with kernel 2.4.22-1.2115.nptl, and currently
attempting to get it working with KDE.  Mplayer is
MPlayer1.0pre3.1-RPM-3.2.2

-- 
Jason Stechschulte
stech at ypisco.com

We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.
		-- Margaret Mead