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This article or section documents something not included in the current version of Scratch (3.0). It is only useful from a historical perspective. |
The Scratch Movie Player Morph is a Scratch Morph that allows movies from a computer to be played in Scratch.
Getting the Movie Player Morph
First, shift-click the R, and click on the white area around the edge of the screen, the World Menu will appear. Then, click on New Morph:
This time, the "Add a new morph" menu will appear, with a list of options. Move the mouse over to "movies," the seventh option down on the list, and another option will appear. It should say 'MoviePlayerMorph'. Clicking this will make it appear on the screen.
Now the movie player will be on the mouse, and can be moved around. It is recommended that it be placed in the top left corner of a Scratch project so all of the movie can be seen. To move it around after placing it, Alt-Click on it four times and select the brown icon with the square in it. Once finished moving it, click elsewhere.
Using the Movie Player Morph
The first button, on the left of the movie player says "open." This allows importing a video file into the movie player, so it can be played. The file must be an MPEG or JPEG filetype.
The next button is "Menu" which contains the following options:
- Turn on/off repeat - Loops the movie
- Set frame rate - Sets the rate at which the movie plays in frames per second
- Create JPEG from MPEG - Converts an MPEG movie file into a JPEG image file
- Create JPEG from folder of frames - Creates a JPEG movie file by putting together lots of pictures in a folder
The next option is "Rewind," this does what it says and rewinds the movie that is playing.
After that, it is "Play," which also does what it says. It plays the movie from the current point until the end (if repeat is off) or until the stop button is pressed.
The stop button, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, stops the movie playing.
The left and right arrows next to it allow choosing between movies to play.
The two bars below all the other options control the volume, and position in time within the movie. The bottom option only changes the movie currently on screen.
Problems
The movie player does not work in Presentation Mode, and projects with it cannot be uploaded to the Scratch Website. Also, since it limits the file types used to MPEG and JPEG, many types of files must be converted before playing. Finally, a project with the morph in cannot be saved.
Related Blocks
In Scratch 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 there were several experimental blocks that could be used with the movie player that were cut from the final release. They included blocks to start and stop the movie, blocks to change the zoom and pan, and blocks to set the fade.
