Blockbuster and Sidecar

Using blockbuster in standalone mode is designed to be fairly easy and intuitive. To start blockbuster with a movie file open and ready to go, simply type blockbuster movie.sm, replacing movie.sm with the actual name of your movie, of course.

DMX, "Distributed Multi-Headed X," is a Linux-based technology for letting multiple computers share in one X display. In this lesson, we will set up an example DMX session to show how blockbuster works in that environment. The lesson assumes you know how to set up and run your DMX server.
At LLNL, steps 1 and 2 are usually taken care of by the Telepath session management program for convenience.

Sometimes sidecar needs to know what port blockbuster is listening for incoming connections. This simple diagram shows how to get that information.

This lesson gives an overview of the purpose and technology of sidecar. Generally, sidecar is used to organize and enable presentation of movies on a Powerwall using blockbuster.

Sidecar provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for interacting with a remote instance of blockbuster, providing all the blockbuster controls on a local interface, called the "remote control GUI."

When you click "Launch Blockbuster" from the control GUI, or execute a Movie Cue from the movie cue edit/control GUI when blockbuster is not yet running, you are prompted with the "Launch or Connect to Blockbuster" dialog. The purpose of this dialog is to either launch a new instance of blockbuster or connect to an already-running instance somewhere.

Movie Cues are a powerful feature of sidecar for managing organized presentations. Each movie cue brings blockbuster to a "prerecorded" state in a single mouse double-click. When a cue executes, then blockbuster is launched if needed, then sent a stream of commands that bring it into the desired state, moving the window, playing the movies or not, etc. This is ideal for a rehearsed or oft-repeated presentation.