I wanted to use Raspberry Pi’s to show a few .mp4 films, especially on old televisions & analog screens
Here’s a list of tips and tricks:
– Default (a reminder): login = pi, password = raspberry
– sudo just works – no password –> you need it to halt & to reboot (and lots more, of course)
– I installed the system with Noobs, the easy way to install Raspbian.
This did force hdmi to be default screen output. The analog video out just stayed dormant.
–> So I edited the config file:
$ sudo nano /boot/config.txt
Scroll down to the bottom and hash/comment out (add a #) the bottom part, added by Noobs, with regard to hdmi.
– To play the video’s, use omxplayer –> it is a mediaplayer adapted to the Raspberry Pi (semiclosed) Hardware.
– The omxplayer controls do not have man pages in my version of Raspbian. Here you can find them online.
– The omxplayer -b –loop did not work for my video’s
So, with some help some time later, here’s a little bash script that you can run in the terminal (even without startx).
#!/bin/bash
while true
do
omxplayer lala.mp4
done
–> call it omxplayer4ever.sh and launch it with
$ bash omxplayer4ever.sh
The script needs to be in the same folder your film is.
You do still see the terminal lurking behind the video..
In the meantime I have found this excellent post by Julien Deswaef, right on topic!
Thanks 😉
– Taking Julien’s advice on hiding the terminal
–> add setterm -blank 1 to your /etc/rc.local file
$sudo nano /etc/rc.local
Write it before the line exit 0, keeping that command at the end, then save the file and exit.
What you are doing here is hiding the terminal after 1 minute of inactivity. Just nudging a key on your keyboard revives it. If you add something/instructions/a command in the /etc/rc.local file, it launches it at start-up.
– to stop the video’s from playing -> do ctrl+c a few times quickly
