C-Play : Cluster Media Player

C-Play is an open source cluster media player, useful for video playback and presentations in immersive environments, such as domes and powerwalls.

Documentation

https://c-toolbox.github.io/C-Play/

Content features

These are just some features that set C-Play apart from other media and video players:

C-Play support media that is:

• Stereoscopic (Side-by-side or Top-Bottom) and Monoscopic

• 180 fulldome / fisheye

• 360 equirectangular or equiangular cubemap (common on YouTube)

• Any "flat" media with arbitrary aspect ratio

Primary media, such as video and images, is easily opened and configured through playfiles and added to playlists for a standard media player setup. An additional powerful feature in C-Play is the presentation tool, where you can add an arbitrary number of layers within slides using numerous inputs, such as:

• Images (PNG, JPG, TIFF, WEBP etc)

• PDF (Common export format from PPT)

• Videos (H264, HEVC/H265, AV1/H266, VP9 etc)

• Audio (WAV, AAC, MP3 etc)

• NDI, OMT or Spout (Network video/audio or live sharing across local apps.)

• Streams (YouTube and similar inputs supported through FFmpeg)

• Text (With custom fonts, also used for subtitles)

With the layer types above, you can make it almost as easy as using PowerPoint to create an immersive presentation.

Technical features

• Runs a Qt/QML UI application on the master computer and a small non-UI GLFW/SGCT application on the nodes/clients.

• Sync playback, loading and other properties between master and clients.

• Playing audio is usually performed on master (Support for node audio is added in 2.2). Change of audio output is supported, and C-Play is pre-built with "JACK", which opens for multi-channel low-latency output to for instance ASIO devices.

• Loading external audio files as multiple tracks.

• Editing and saving playlists and playfiles including all necessary parameters.

• Configure "sections" in an editor to create bookmarks for jumping between clips inside a larger movie.

• C-Play nodes can run on top of other applications. On the master, viewing your video or a layer on a secondary monitor is also simple and requires no extra decoding resources.

• HTTP Web API, so you can integrate C-Play control into a custom system.

• REST Commands (HTTP and WebSockets) to control other application, such as OBS Studio which C-Play then can receive content from.

• Tested and used on Windows 10/11, in domes and other big arenas.

Backend

C-Play is an open source cluster video player, based on these open source projects:

• SGCT - Our own simple graphics cluster toolkit
• LibMPV - command line video player, using FFmpeg
• FFmpeg - The one and only video decoder/encoder
• Haruna - Qt/QML UI for MPV

Optional libraries in current C-Play builds include:

• NDI - Support frame-synced NDI streams, video and audio
• OMT (Open Media Transport) - Support OMT video and audio streams
• Poppler - For rendering PDF pages
• Wuffs & Sail - For more extensive image decoding

Build on Windows

• Use the Craft Guide to install all dependencies for the UI, including Qt and KDE Frameworks libraries.

• Use the Build FFMPEG and MPV Guide guide to build FFmpeg and MPV with JACK+portaudio support.

• Install optional libraries such as NDI, OMT, and Poppler, for network video/audio and PDF support, either through installers or using vcpkg where available.

• Configure C-Play with CMake.

• It is also good practice to follow the Deploy Guide to copy the build and its dependencies into a single binary folder.

• Build in Visual Studio 2022, or whichever IDE you prefer.