Video Looper for Raspbian
Automatically play and loop fullscreen videos on a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3.
This system uses a basic bash script to play videos with omxplayer, it simply checks if omxplayer isn't running and then starts it again. This simple method seems to work flawlessly for weeks on end without freezing or glitches. The only caveat of this method is that there are approximately 2-3 seconds of black between each video.
Other solutions:
- Slooper by Matthias Dörfelt. Needs a few updates to work without a remote (as of May 15, 2016).
- RPILOOPER at The Curious Technologist (unexplored at this writing). Apparently loops one video only, from a USB thumb drive.
- RPI Video Looper purportely supports audio (found via that previous link in this list), but there’s a 1-2 second delay between loops.
- adafruit pi video looper written in python that uses omxplayer by Adafruit, but unfortunately on testing looping videos for more than a day it froze (as of May 15, 2016).
The script for this solution here (Video Looper for Raspbian) will look for videos either in:
- the
videodirectory in the home directory of the pi user - a usb stick plugged in before startup (this will not be remounted if you pull it out and plug it back in)
Installation
Grab 'n Go
Copy the prebuilt img to a micro SD card using these instructions. The img was setup using the steps below and 2016-05-10-raspbian-jessie-lite was used as the base raspbian image.
Or Roll Your Own
Start with a raspbian img, install it on the pi, and follow the steps below to install the videolooper.
You may have luck with rollYourOwn.sh, which runs all the following commands. First you'll have to fetch it from the terminal using wget. See comments therein.
Install omxplayer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install omxplayer
Setup auto mounting of usb stick
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/usbdisk
sudo echo \"/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdisk vfat ro,nofail 0 0\" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
Create folder for videos in home directory
mkdir /home/pi/video
Download startvideo.sh and put it in /home/pi/
cd /home/pi
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/timatron/videolooper-raspbian/master/startvideo.sh
chmod uga+rwx startvideo.sh
Add startvideo.sh to .bashrc so it auto starts on login
echo \"/home/pi/startvideo.sh" | tee -a /home/pi/.bashrc
Make system autoboot into pi user
sudo raspi-config
- Select option: "3 Boot Options"
- Select option: "B2 Console Autologin"
Expand your root partition if you want to
sudo raspi-config
- Select option: "1 Expand Filesystem"