I'm setting up the A/V for a holiday party this weekend and have an idea that I'm not sure how to implement.

I have a bunch of Christmas movies (Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, etc.) that I'd like to have running continuously at the party. The setup is a MacBook connected to a projector. I want this to be a background ambiance thing so it's going to be running silently.

Since all of the movies are in the +1 hour range, instead of just playing them all through from beginning to end, I'd like to show small samples randomly and continuously. Ideally the way it would work is that every five minutes it would choose a random 5-minute sample from a random movie in the playlist/directory and display it. Once that clip is over, it should choose another clip and do some sort of fade/wipe to the chosen clip.

I'm not sure where to start on this, beginning with what player I should use. Can VLC do something like this? MPlayer? If there's a player with an extensive scripting language (support for rand(), video length discovery, random video access). If so, I will probably be able to RTFM and get it working; it's just that I don't have time to backtrack from dead-ends so I'd like to start off on the right track. Any suggestions?