- Slooper turns your raspberry pi into a seamless HD video looper. (no pause, hickup between loop iterations)
- Slooper will play a video from a usb drive. Changing the video means simply replacing the video file on the usb drive.
- Slooper will cleanly boot into the video to turn your pi into a video playback kiosk.
- Slooper will allow you to turn the pi on and off with a remote.
- Slooper comes in the form of a python install script that modifies an existing Raspbian installation which is a lot more maintainable than creating a custom image.
- Slooper is MIT licensed.
- Slooper does not support audio right now.
- Slooper does not support arbitrary video containers right now. H264 ONLY!
- A Raspberry Pi and a fitting SD card, power supply etc.
- A remote board: http://www.msldigital.com/collections/all-products
- Any IR remote.
- A USB thumb drive
- InstallSlooperWithRemote.py is the installation script to modify your clean Raspbian image.
- RemoteVideo.py is the python script that is installed by the installation script to play the video and handle the remote. It exists so you can test it separately.
- Install the remote board on your raspberry pi as described in the Installation section here: http://www.msldigital.com/pages/support-for-remotepi-board-plus-2015/
- Put a .m4v or .h264 video on the USB thumbdrive.
- Create a Videos.json file and place it on the USB drive. See separate section below.
- Plug the USB drive into the Pi.
- Download the most recent Raspbian image from the raspberry pi website: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
- Install the image on the SD card of your choice as described here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/mac.md
- Connect the Pi to the internet (with an ethernet cable).
- Start up your raspberry pi by plugging the power into its power slot.
- Boot up your pi and perform all the raspi-config steps that you want to do (look here for more info: http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/raspi-config.md)
- Run
sudo apt-get install gitto make sure git is up to date. - Enter the directory that you want to clone the Slooper repository to, i.e.
cd /home/pi - Clone this git repository
git clone https://github.com/mokafolio/Slooper.git - Enter the repository directory, i.e.
cd Slooper - Run the installation script:
sudo python InstallSlooperWithRemote.py, this will take a while. - Shut down the pi:
sudo poweroff - Replug the power to the remote pi board.
- To install the powerbutton of your remote, do the following: Choose the button on the remote you want to use to switch your RPi on and off in the future, then press the hardware button on top of the RemotePi Board for about 10 seconds until you see the LED blinking green and red. Now you have about 20 seconds time to aim the remote towards the RemotePi Board’s infrared receiver and press the button you want to use for powering on your RPi. You will see the green LED flashing once when the button was learned. If no infrared command is learned within 20 seconds you see the red LED flash and the learning mode is exited without changing the current configuration.
- Done, you should be able to turn the Pi on and off using your remote now and it should nicely boot into the video on the USB stick.
- The Videos.json file allows you to map videos to display configurations (i.e. a certain resolution and display refresh rate), as well as mapping videos to keys on the keyboard, so you can cycle through them. Here is an example:
{
"maxPlayMinutes": 720, #pi will shut down after this time has elapsed
"settings":
{
"LowRes":
{
"displayPixelWidth": 1024,
"displayPixelHeight": 768,
"displayScan": "progressive",
"displayRate": 60
},
"HD":
{
"displayPixelWidth": 1920,
"displayPixelHeight": 1080,
"displayScan": "progressive",
"displayRate": 60
}
},
"videoGroups":
[
{
"files":
[
"a.m4v",
"b.m4v"
],
"settings": "LowRes",
"key": "1"
},
{
"files":
[
"c.m4v"
],
"settings": "HD",
"key": "2"
}
]
}
This Videos.json has two different display settings, one for HD playback and one for 1024*768, and two video groups, holding three videos. The first video group contains two videos, a.m4v and b.m4v, using the low res settings. They are mapped to key "1" meaning that whenever you hit "1" on your keyboard, it will go to the next video in the files list. The second video group only contains one video, uses the HD settings and is mapped to key "2".
Slooper creates two temporary files on your usb drive. SlooperLog.txt which mainly servers debugging purposes. It is a file that Slooper uses to log information to. The other file is called SlooperCache.json which is a file used by Slooper to cache information. Right now it is mainly used to save which video was played, when Slooper exited the last time. This will be the video that will continue playing on the next start of Slooper.
- The installation script is losely based on this article: http://curioustechnologist.com/post/90061671996/rpilooper-v2-seamless-video-looper-step-by-step , fully automating the steps that are necessary while adding some extra scripts and things to handle the remote and json configuration files.
- It will update your Raspbian.
- It will build all the pi software examples.
- It will slightly change the hello_pi/video example to perform the seamless looping. This will be used to playback the video. (I did a lot of research to see what method provides the best seamless loop, omxplayer, openFrameworks etc.. The hello_video example performed best by far! That's also why there is now audio support right now).
- It will create a mounting point for the USB drive and make sure it mounts on every boot.
- It will install a python script called RemoteVideo.py to /home/pi/Scripts. This script will start and stop the video and handle the remote.
- It will add that script to the startup items (by changing /etc/rc.local).
- It will adjust /boot/cmdline.txt to hide the Pi logo and console text while booting.
For implementation details, check out the actual script!
- Slooper has been tested on a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
- Slooper has been tested with 2015-02-16-raspbian-wheezy.img
- Expose some of the internals of the installation script through settings.
- Make a Slooper version without a remote.
- Make a Slooper version that starts/exits videos on a timer.
- 1080p
- H264 format
- VBR 2 pass
- setting the bitrate target and max to 60 seemed a good compromise of speed and quality.
- Export as .m4v or .h264