How can I interrupt a movie based on user input to a GUI

I have a GUI that displays video to a user. I want the video to stop playing when the user presses a particular button. Unfortunately, the movie (I am using the movie() command) continues to play until it is done on its own.

How can I interrupt the playback of movie() based on a buttonpress event (i.e. from a user event callback).

BTW, I don't believe Ctrl-C will work, because I don't want the GUI to stop running. I want to terminate the movie running in a particular axes on the GUI, and start another movie in the same axes.

Thanks in advance, Sean

[Sean]

I have also tried to kill the axes that the video is running in (using the axes handle), but I get an error (presumably because movie() is still actively using the axes?)

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

A totally different approach:

Instead of playing the movie with movie; write a function that traverses the frames and displays them using imshow. Start the movie, set the frame rate etc. using a timer and stop the timer to stop the movie. Useful documentation:

doc timer

This obviously will require more work; but can be tuned to give you exactly what you want.

[Sean]

Thank you. I had never used timers before (still relatively new to matlab), but this turned out to do exactly what I wanted.

Answer 2

[B_Richardson]

Try this : http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/4441-activex-control-for-windows-media-player

[Sean]

Thank you. I appreciate your looking this up, but... This solution appears to be overly complicated for what I am working on.

I am playing short clips and letting an operator grade the video quality of each, not trying to run a general purpose media player. (This example would increase my code size by more than an order of magnitude).

Thanks again though. :)

Answer 3

[Sean de Wolski]

You could kill the axes inside a try/catch block so that the error is not reported and so that nothing bad happens.

[Sean]

Thanks for the tip... I hadn't run into try/catch before.

Using this I was able to see that the "delete(h.video)" was not generating the error (technically anyway). The delete executes fine, but the axes just stays there and continues running (presumably because movie() is still running).

Unfortunately, from that point on movie() still runs in the axes and any further references to h.video generate errors.