Use your Electric Objects hardware as a Very Slow Movie Player

Bryan Boyer created a wondrous object that he called a Very Slow Movie Player. It uses an ePaper display to play a movie at 24 frames per hour.

Slowing things down to an extreme measure creates room for appreciation of the object, but the prolonged duration shifts the relationship between object, viewer, and context. A film watched at 1/3,600 of the original speed is not merely a very slow movie, it’s a hazy timepiece. And while a thing like Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) wouldn’t tell you the time, it helps you see yourself against the smear of time.

I had been looking for new content for my Electric Objects EO1, so decided to turn it into a VSMP. The backlit, full-color EO1 hardware creates a very different experience than ePaper, so I'd have to forgo the beautiful interactions with ambient light, but I couldn't bear to watch the 2001 "Star Gate" sequence in black-and-white...

Want to do this yourself?

1. You can use https://www.electricobjects.com/set_url to show an arbitrary URL on your device.
2. You'll need to first extract the frames from whatever movie file you'd like to play slowly. FFmpeg is great for this. As an alternative, I considered playing the movie file one frame at a time in the browser, but wasn't sure my EO1 would be up to the task and was less familiar with the Javascript involved.
3. You'll need to host the frames, along with the included Python web server, somewhere your device can see them. A two-hour movie could easily have a few hundred GBs worth of 1920x1080 frames, so you'll probably want to do this from a machine running on your local wi-fi network. Note that the web server is pretty simple, so it can only handle one device at a time.
4. There are a few URL parameters for specifying the frame rate (e.g. 30 fps, 60 fps, or more for debugging), whether you want to crop or letterbox the frames onto your 16:9 device, and whether you'd like the current frame number displayed in the top-left corner. There are also a few arguments to specify for the web server, including the first and last frame, the port, and the output locaiton for the logs. The logs are useful for picking up where you left off if something goes wrong.
5. The included mounting hardware works well in landscape, but the browser won't know that it's sideways, so the CSS uses transform: rotate accordingly.

Let me know if you have any questions!