Is there any API to interact with the eCAL Player?

[piyush-m0]

Language: C++

Can someone help me with interacting with the eCAL Player?

I wish to use the ecal_meas_cutter tool for trimming eCAL recordings, but if I use the eCAL Player and eCAL Recorder, if the Player is paused midway recording, a wrong trimmed recording is saved since the recording will think of it as frame drops.

Is there any C++ API to interact with the eCAL Player to take the relative timestamp of ongoing recording being played so that I can pass them to the ecal_meas_cutter tool as an argument as start and end timestamps?

Please let me know if Monitoring API can help me with this as well by any change.

[DownerCase]

To directly answer the title, yes eCAL player (and most of the applications) have an eCAL services API for remote control; though I didn't fully understand your problem to say if it's a good solution. Primarily confused about the relevance of eCAL player/recorder as ecal_meas_cutter operates directly on existing recordings.

The monitoring API could let you figure out the currently active (with synchronization time error) topics.

Intro to eCAL services:
https://eclipse-ecal.github.io/ecal/getting_started/services.html

The eCAL monitor is able to show what services an application advertises:
https://eclipse-ecal.github.io/ecal/getting_started/monitor.html#services

Samples:
https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal/tree/support/v5.13/samples/cpp/services/ecalplayer_client
https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal/tree/support/v5.13/samples/cpp/services/ecalplayer_gui_client

Source Protobuf defining the eCAL player services:
https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal/blob/support/v5.13/app/app_pb/src/ecal/app/pb/play/service.proto

[piyush-m0]

Ah, yeah. Sounds cool. In that case you'd probably also want to use the measurement API so that you can access the recording file and figure out the begin and end timestamps. https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal/blob/support/v5.13/samples/cpp/measurement/measurement_read/src/measurement_read.cpp

Hi,

So for getting the begin and end timestamps, I would need to use the GetMaxTimestamp and GetMinTimestamp methods of the eCAL::experimental::measurement::hdf5::Reader class right? This is part of the include header file <ecal/measurement/hdf5/reader.h>

The sample you shared above has the structure IMeasurement from the header file <ecal/measurement/imeasurement.h>. Is this one relevant?

[piyush-m0]

So for getting the begin and end timestamps, I would need to use the GetMaxTimestamp and GetMinTimestamp methods of the eCAL::experimental::measurement::hdf5::Reader class right? This is part of the include header file <ecal/measurement/hdf5/reader.h>

I am using this include header, and I am encountering build errors:

/usr/bin/ld: CMakeFiles/measurement_cutter.dir/src/main.cpp.o: in function `main':
main.cpp:(.text.startup+0xe4): undefined reference to `eCAL::experimental::measurement::hdf5::Reader::Reader(std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&)'

Is a separate linking necessary for this? I currently use the following only in my CMakeLists for eCAL:

find_package(eCAL REQUIRED)
find_package(Protobuf REQUIRED)

...
...
...

target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE
  eCAL::core
  protobuf::libprotobuf
)

[DownerCase]

You need to link to eCAL::measurement_hdf5 as well to use the experimental API
https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal/blob/support/v5.13/contrib/measurement/hdf5/CMakeLists.txt

There is also the original eCAL::eh5::HDF5Meas which has similar functions. The CMake target for that is eCAL::hdf5

[DownerCase]

The sample you shared above has the structure IMeasurement from the header file <ecal/measurement/imeasurement.h>. Is this one relevant?

I only linked that as its the only reference I could find that wasn't the source code itself.

[piyush-m0]

eCAL::measurement_hdf5

I will try this.