About the good use of the “Run Command” box

The OpenViBE box named Run Command is an interesting box I want to talk about today. The idea behind this box is to enable OpenViBE to launch any application you want the same way as if you had a console opened and typed a command to launch. Most people can’t see an immediate interest with such box. This is probably because they are not familiar with command line applications or command line interfaces (CLI)…

In fact, OpenViBE being a young software, many functionalities are missing right now. For example, there’s almost nothing to play with sounds or audio stuff (except the unstable Sound Player box which only works on Linux cat-ing a wave file on /dev/dsp which is almost the ugliest way to do it ). I know some users feel uncomfortable with this. However, the Run Command box allows to easily play some sounds with command line programs. On Linux, I found ogg123, mpg123, flac123 and music123. They will let you play any file you want and they are included in most general purpose Linux distribution (e.g. xubuntu).

Of course, you can imagine a number of other applications for this box such as displaying images for user instructions, starting an external training process in Matlab or Python after some data acquisition, etc…

The most interesting part is that you may control other applications through their CLI when they have one available. For example, the VLC media player has such interface available. So yes, it is already possible to control VLC with OpenViBE mixing a couple of telnet commands in the Run Command box after the classification process…

Feel the true value of this box 😉

Happy openvibe-ing !