stevenhickson / rpivideolooper

Video Looper for the Raspberry Pi

RPiVideoLooper

Video Looper for the Raspberry Pi

There are 3 main scripts.

startfullscreen.sh starts the looper script whether X is running or not. So it can work with SSH or headless. It also uses the xterm fullscreen hack to make a black fullscreen no matter the video resolution. It should be in the /home/pi/ directory

startvideos.sh loops through all the videos in the /home/pi/videos/ directory. It should be in the /home/pi/ directory.

videoloop sets up the service and starts it on boot. It calls startfullscreen.sh. It should be in the /etc/init.d/ directory. You will have to use the update-rc.d script to set it to start on boot if you are not using the install script.

The install script is available if you don't want to download the image.

The image can be downloaded here: https://mega.nz/#!5IsgnSja!UaEbsc3byFuMD6psgz3CuxcwB0x8SfdqgcDxqgK1gE4

rpivideolooper's Issues

Videolooper starting too fast before wifi network

Hi,

When using Video looper to connect to a SMB share (on Windows) using wifi connection, the application Video Looper is starting before SMB mount completion.

Is there a way to check that there are files in the target directory and wait before starting the app or to restart the app using a cron entry ?

Thank you for yoru help
Best Regards

command not found

Hi, I didn't launched the setup, because I would like to have a test before, so I just copyed the files into the /home/pi/ and then while into that path I write:
sudo startfullscreen.sh
or
sudo startvideos.sh
and I receive always the same answer:
bash: startfullscreen.sh: command not found.

locks up

When I use the 3.7gb image I can run videos for days and the system does not lock up.
My smaller Minibian based version locks up, not sure how quickly.
Ran it overnight and it was locked up by morning, stuck on a still frame image onscreen.
I am using the USB drive but it happens with both internal and USB.
Here is a link to my image file, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2w97gVYBA8wYWNxQm1pVUFYSG8/view?usp=sharing

Has anyone else had an issue with the software locking up after doing an install(meaning not using the image file provided)?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Looper plays videos out of order or skips some

Hi,

Has anyone else seen this? Sometimes the looper will skip over a video. In my scenario, I have a few long and lots of short videos (a TV program with commercials), and it's occasionally skipping over the long ones. The file itself is fine, and it will play the long videos on the second go-around, but will always skip certain ones on the first loop.

For example, if I have

• long.mp4
• short1.mp4
• short2.mp4

Then it will play, short1.mp4, short2.mp4, and then long.mp4.

Has anyone seen this behavior? Any ideas where to look for a solution?

ZW

MP3 Music Screen

So music MP3's play great.
The screen goes black while they play.

Is there a way to assign an image to the MP3 or possibly just a Blank Screen Image that will show when the music plays?

Seemless Transitions

So I have been doing a bunch of research on this and it seems that some people have gotten 'looping' to work seemlessly with the OMX Player.
Unfortunately it crashes after a certain amount of time.
Here is a discussion of the looping
popcornmix/omxplayer#187
This is of course looping 1 video so I am not sure how it would handle a list of videos.

So I did some more research and found this method from years ago that works well, Here is the link to the post http://www.sundh.com/blog/2013/10/loop-videos-seamlessly-omxplayer/

It is pretty straight forward.
You start 2 videos and play the first and pause the second.
When the first ends you start the second and there is no gap in playback.
Then you start a 3rd video which could be the first video again and pause it.
Then you repeat to infinity.
I wonder if this Python method could be implemented for the RPiVideoLooper.
This method uses a duplicate copy of the video so it can go back and forth.
So if you are using just one video it would be recommend to duplicate it and rename it.

This method is rather straight forward but I am not sure if some other issue might come up as it did with the OMX Player looping with a log file getting to large and crashing things.

USB drive isn't mounted automatically

I think the script needs
sudo mkdir /media/USB
sudo mount -t vfat -o rw /dev/sda1 /media/USB

plus we need it to automatically add a line to the file system table:
sudo nano /etc/fstab

add the line:
/dev/sda1 /media/USB vfat uid=pi,gid=pi 0 0

I'd amend the scripts myself, but (sorry) my scripting skills are very limited. I'd love it if your RPiVideoLooper would be widely used instead of expensive and buggy 'media players'.

Image file does not exist

The image file linked in the README does not exist: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx2uFItyJkdlcVBIVjZjRDhjYmc/edit?usp=sharing

not starting automatically

Hi,I really like your script but I had some problems with it. It didn't start automatically.
sudo bash autostart.sh gave the error
"-bash: videoloop: command not found"
service videoloop start produced:
"Starting system videoloop daemon:start-stop-daemon: unable to open pidfile '/var/run/videoloop.pid' for writing (Permission denied)
."

My experience is limited but this command fixed it for me (seems I needed to create startup links)
sudo update-rc.d videoloop defaults

I'm using the latest build of Raspbian, 2014-06-20.

xterm

Hi,

I cant make the border go black, seams like the xterm hack is not working on my side?

-f-

/boot/looperconfig.txt ingnored

Setting autostart=0 does not stop videoloop from starting.

the link into readme.md is breaked

this link to the bottom of readme.md doesn't work, please update:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx2uFItyJkdlcVBIVjZjRDhjYmc/edit?usp=sharing

Error: unable to read /etc/init.d//etc/init.d/videoloop

I have an error using fresh install of Raspbian 2013-12-20...

$ unzip RPiVideoLooper-master.zip
$ cd RPiVideoLooper-master/
$ sudo sh install.sh
update-rc.d: using dependency based boot sequencing
update-rc.d: error: unable to read /etc/init.d//etc/init.d/videoloop

Pi Zero W issues

----- Update ------
update. I understand the file has to be called Video.h264, but it still doesn't work. I switched to command line omxplayer and got it to work.

---Original Q---

I've been building this out from scratch using the tutorial here:

Everything works properly until I get to Step 5 – Play a test video (the video on my usb drive is called Video.mp4

cd /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video/

./hello_video.bin /mnt/usb/Video.mp4

It drops down as if it is doing something, but nothing plays back.

any ideas on why this isn't working?

Seamless not working at all - script incomplete

Hi, the new seamless option (from the March 10, 2015 version) isn't working. I think the script doesn't call it properly. It seems to look for a "seamless=1" option in /boot/looperconfig.txt. When you add that it acknowledges that (seamless isn't 0)
but throws this error afterwards:
startvideos.sh: line 25: /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video/hello_video.bin: No such file or directory
I've installed the scripts from Github onto a brand new 2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy.

First Video Skipped on First While Loop

The counter variable should probably be incremented at the bottom of the loop. Currently it skips the 0 video until it makes the 2nd pass through the list of videos.

Reducing Install Size a bit more

So I wanted to shrink the install a bit more from 3.7GB
So I started with Minibian - https://minibianpi.wordpress.com/
I started from scratch as the first version was unstable.
Below is the updated method I used. At the end of creating this when I rebooted I now get a login BUT there is also video glitching like Green writing happening every 5 - 10 seconds.
I tested the hardware with another install and the hardware worked fine so the install I created has the glitching.

1. Use Minibian to image an SD memory chip
2. Install Raspi-config - apt-get install raspi-config
   2a. I had to manually resize the first time - IF YOU DO NOT INSTALL THIS FIRST YOU WILL TOO
3. Use raspi-config to Expand the GPU to 128mb
4. Reboot Happens Automagically after you leave raspi-config
5. apt-get update
6. apt-get upgrade
7. Reboot
8. Create User adduser pi - Install all the Looper Software into the correct folders
9. Install Git - apt-get install git
10. Install OMX Player - apt-get install omxplayer
11. Install fbset apt-get install fbset
12. Move to the Pi Directory before you clone the respository
13. Clone Steven Hickenson's Directory `git clone https://github.com/StevenHickson/RPiVideoLooper
14. Install Steven Hickenson's Looper14a. Remove the tag from the Install Script #update-rc.d videoloop defaults - I used Filezilla to FTP and update the script - You could use VI but Nano is not installed 14b../install.sh`
15. Need to create/home/pi/videos and put videos into it
16. must install NTFS as that is what is used for the USB apt-get install ntfs-3g
17. changing autostart.sh to 755 as I could not get it to start when I tried as a stand alone file(I think the error is because I did not have a video folder) - ./autostart.sh: line 6: Starting: command not found Here is the code at line 6 service videoloop start
18. NEED TO update everything again
    18a. apt-get update
    18b. apt-get upgrade
19. Reboot
20. installed rpi-update apt-get install rpi-update
21. rpi-update
22. Copied fstab from the original looper image /dev/sda1 /media/USB ntfs-3g defaults,noatime,nodiratime 0 0