DEPNotify Video

cdebard1
New Contributor

Hello,

My team and I are trying to release a new enrollment look for our greater team and we found that DEPNotify can really make it look good. Is it possible while depnotify is running to have a video come up and play? On the other hand is it possible to just have the depnotify screen toggle through images as it is running certain policies to give us the ability to share more information with our endusers.

What we've tried:

Inside the DEPNotify script towards the end after all the polices have completed it have the command -

# Play the video file 
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1
echo "open -a QuickTime\ Player /usr/local/att/Mac_Welcome_Video_Test_3.mp4" >> /var/tmp/depnotify.log
sleep 80
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 0

We have also tried taking out of the DEPNotify script and gave it is own policy where it is called as the very last ticket item using the same script as shown above. 

 

Thank you in advance for the support. 

5 REPLIES 5

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

I'm not using DEPNotify anymore myself, and I haven't done a video, but according the information still out there on usage, it lists the following on this page:

https://gitlab.com/Mactroll/DEPNotify/-/tree/master

Video:
Plays a video from a stream or local source. DEPNotify automatically detects if it’s a local or http video. (Video formats accepted .m4v, .mp4, .m3u8)

Example: Command: Video: https://example.com/awesome_video.mp4
Example: Command: Video: /var/tmp/awesome_video.mp4

In other words, you can update the main DEPNotify window to display a video, rather than try to get the app to open a separate video file. I would try that to see if it gets you what you want.

Thank you mm2270, I have attempted to add that Command though it is not pulling the file. Rather just continues though the process skipping over that line. 

 

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

That's odd. Like I said, I didn't use the video embedding feature when I was using DEPNotify, but just for kicks, I decided to try it out, and it was working for me.

Can you make sure you're directing the command at the command file, as in

 

echo "Command: Video: https://example.com/awesome_video.mp4" >> "/private/var/tmp/depnotify.log"

 

Doing the above, I was able to update the main content of the DEPNotify window to display a short screencapture video I made. I made sure there were no spaces in either the filename or the path to the file. I have had problems with that before with similar types of commands, so I would check that as well.

Now, all that being said, I would also highly recommend looking at swiftDialog and Dan Snelson's script to see if it's better for your needs. swiftDialog is being continuously updated by the developer, Bart Reardon, who is very responsive on his github repo, and open to almost any new suggestions (as long as they're reasonable). It can display videos, URLs, images, lists text fields, checkboxes and lots of other content, and like DEPNotify can be updated in real time in most cases.

jphillips
Release Candidate Programs Tester

Like @mm2270, we've moved on from DEPNotify. it served us for a long time, but it doesn't seem to be updated much anymore. We've adopted SwiftDialog for our onboarding.

A great starting point to learn how to utilize it is @dan-snelson's Setup Your Mac script.

@jphillips Thank you for the suggestion! I will take a look into this and pitch it as an option for an upgraded experience.