Most commercial games these days have small movie clips that try to explain the plot to us. For instance, a first-person shooter could have a movie showing a briefing about the next mission. Movie playback is a cool feature to have. Pygame offers limited support for MPEG movies.
We need to have a MPEG movie for this demo. Once you have a movie you can convert it to be used in a Pygame game with the following command:
ffmpeg -i <infile> -vcodec mpeg1video -acodec libmp3lame -intra <outfile.mpg>
Installing ffmpeg and the command-line options are outside the scope of this book, but shouldn't be too difficult (see http://ffmpeg.org/).
The movie playback is set up similarly to the audio playback that we covered in the previous recipe. The following code demonstrates playing a MPEG video. Pay particular attention to the play function:
import pygame, sys
from pygame.locals import *
import time
pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 400))
pygame.display.set_caption('Movie Demo')
def play():
movie = pygame.movie.Movie('out.mpg')
movie.play()
TIMEOUT = 7
pygame.time.delay(TIMEOUT * 1000)
movie.stop()
while True:
screen.fill((255, 255, 255))
for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == QUIT:
play()
pygame.quit()
sys.exit()
pygame.display.update()The relevant functions for the movie playback can found in this table:
|
Function |
Description |
|---|---|
|
|
This function creates a |
|
|
This function starts playing the movie |
|
|
This function stops playback of the movie |