[ANSWERED] is it possible to open Syphon Virtual Webcam from inside Izzy?

[dbini]

An 'Open Virtual Webcam' actor would be great, but is there another way to launch the Syphon Virtual Webcam app from inside Isadora?

[Fred]

@dbini It is with the pythoner actor!

Here is some cross platform code that will open an external application from Isadora. Funnily I have a memory that this kind of trickery was explicitly blocked from the Javascript actor, but python is another beast.

Put this code in a pythoner actor and change the name of the application to the one you want to launch (it is notepad or textedit at the moment). Due to the way the actor works all you need to do is send a 1 to the trigger input of the actor (or change this to whatever you want to be the trigger). 

import subprocess
import platform
# python_main is called whenever an input value changes
def python_main(input_1):
    # Check if the input is 1 (or any specific condition to trigger the action)
    if input_1 == 1:
        if platform.system() == "Windows":
            # On Windows, open Notepad
            subprocess.Popen(["notepad.exe"])
        elif platform.system() == "Darwin":  # Darwin is macOS
            # On macOS, open TextEdit
            subprocess.Popen(["open", "-a", "TextEdit"])
    return input_1  # return the input back to the output
# iz_input 1 "trigger"

Of course use this safely, you wouldn't want to play some mean trick on an operator that launched a whole lot of applications on a scene change.

You can modify this further with chatGPT to make the application launch minimized if you want too, or some other conditions like screen position, and if the application allows you can likely pass some variables to it.

Fred