Launching movies with Mala - anyone doing it?

[Dervacumen]

I am building a single player (or alternating 2 player) bartop.  I have my MAME game list set up and working (but it launches games really slow - that's another issue).  I have 50 games installed.

I want to create a second "emulator" list that will launch videos that I've ripped to my hard drive.  The video names will be a game list, and the snap will be either the cover art or something for each video.  I want to be able to select a video, hit "1" and have it start playing full screen.  I think this seems pretty straightforward, but has anyone done it, and if so, what was your experience?

I found the thread about launching PC shortcuts and think this is the key.  I think I saw -somewhere- a good movie player that can be operated with a joystick and buttons (for selecting menus, etc.)

[Cakemeister]

I think you should be able to do that with mplayer. Mplayer can be run from the command line, so any front end which can use customized command line options should be able to run it.

That's what I did for my Khameleon demo. I set up the rom extension as .avi, and the command line to add the image path to the rom name and "-loop 0 -x 640 -y 480" at the end.

[Space Fractal]

I created a arcade cab freindly movie player (ESC = Directly Exit) in the past:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=53951.0

I remember I have included the source code (in Blitz+), so fell free to change it if you have that language.

I do not know how it works with mala, since I only have tested it with mamewah.