Simple Video Presentation with Raspberry Pi

Playing videos in an endless loop is a common problem:
  • Product demos at a trade show or fair
  • Infomercials in a public place or foyer
  • Background fun at a party
  • ...
When I faced this problem at the last LinuxTag we did not want to take a full blown computer with us but make do with a Raspberry Pi. The question was how to turn the Pi into a simple video player with a minimum amount of fuss.

The solution is simple and elegant:
  1. Install OpenELEC (an Kodi distribution) on a SD card
  2. Boot it up once in the Pi to initialize the storage partition
  3. Add the following file in the storage partition as .kodi/userdata/autoexec.py
  4. Add any amount of multimedia files in the storage partition under videos/
  5. Boot up the Pi and enjoy your videos
You can also interrupt the playback and use OpenELEC normally. To go back to the automatic playback simply reboot the system.

And here is our booth with the demo videos in front:

Update 2016-05-13: Adjust for Kodi instead of XBMC. Everything else works as before.

Comments

Post a Comment

Like this content? You could send me something from my Amazon Wishlist. Need commercial support? Contact me for Consulting Services.

Popular posts from this blog

Overriding / Patching Linux System Serial Number

Image
I'm a big fan of test driven development  (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode
Read more

The Demise of KaiOS - Alcatel 3088X

Image
I was really excited, when Firefox OS became commercially available as KaiOS for "smart" feature phones. Unfortunately the high hopes I had put into this platform have been utterly shattered. I was recently looking for a button phone that had only three requirements : very good battery run time, at least several days or a week of standby without charging easy backup or even synchronization of the contacts VoLTE support to benefit from LTE coverage  In Theory... On paper, KaiOS phones look like the perfect match for those requirements. PhoneCopy for KaiOS is a cloud synchronization service that comes with an app for KaiOS (and many other platforms) to synchronize contacts and other phone content to the cloud (and back). With batteries of 1500 mAh and more , KaiOS phones have the potential to deliver outstanding battery performance. The Alcatel 3088X , for example, boasts "up to 300h standby and more than 7h talk time" with a 1530 mAh battery: Battery specification
Read more

A Login Security Architecture Without Passwords

Image
Following up on Lifting the Curse of Static Credentials and Eliminating the Password of Shared Accounts , I have many discussions about why we would benefit from removing password prompts for website logins. Let's dig deeper into the details and show why removing password prompts leads to a  safer security architecture . Update 11.03.2022: Added more details about business vs. consumer websites and additional security suggestions surrounding WebAuthn Problem Space For context, imagine a website that needs to identify online users via their email address. We assume that the website in question is not the primary email system of a user but some other website, e.g. an e-commerce shop system or a collaborative productivity tool. As a User As a user of that website I want to easily sign up for an account have an easy way to login into the account be sure that my account is protected from others or attacks be able to easily recover access to my account i
Read more