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Loop a Video 4evr

Casey Anderson, 2022

Note OMXPlayer is being "phased out" in favor of VLC, this tutorial assumes usage of Raspbian Buster Lite (Legacy), under which OMXPlayer is still available via aptitude

pre-flight

overview

The Raspberry Pi is an excellent low-cost video looper, particularly for situations in which the video needs to "loop forever" and do so automatically on boot. Below are instructions for running the raspberry pi over the command line (via ssh or screen), also known as running "headless."

omxplayer

OMXPlayer is the recommended command line video player for raspbian. One can download and install it via aptitude: sudo apt-get install omxplayer

config file changes

Two quick changes to one config file: /boot/config.txt

  1. Uncomment (delete the #) the line reading #hdmi_force_hotplug=1

  2. Uncomment hdmi_group and hdmi_mode and use the following numbers to set HDMI and 1080p at 60Hz as default (if you need a different default in the future it is simply a matter of updating with different values):

    hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=16

  3. Save and exit the file

acquiring and playing a video

  1. Download and install youtube downloader via their manual installation instructions, also include below:
    1. sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
    2. sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
    3. Confirm that it is working with youtube-dl --version
    4. (optional) Run the following to update youtube-dl to the latest version (might not be necessary): sudo youtube-dl -U
  2. Locate a short video on youtube to act as a test file. for example, one can download the "original" Nyan Cat animation from youtube (as of 03/14/2017) via: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4&t=4s
  3. Use the Unix command mv to change the Nyan Cat video filename (which is obnoxious) to simply nyan_cat.mp4: mv Nyan\ Cat\ \[original\]-QH2-TGUlwu4.mp4 nyan_cat.mp4
  4. Play the video: omxplayer nyan_cat.mp4

looping a video file

omxplayer player has built-in looping functionality: omxplayer --loop nyan_cat.mp4

omxplayer also has a bunch of parameters to customize the specifics of the loop playback. try running the following (replace nyan_cat.mp4 with whatever your video is called): omxplayer -b --loop --no-osd -o hdmi nyan_cat.mp4

more specifically:

  • -b: forces omxplayer to create a black background behind the video
  • --loop: the normal command to force omxplayer to loop a video file
  • --no-osd: hides the on-screen dialogue messages (like "Seeking..." when looping back to the beginning of the video)
  • -o hdmi: forces audio output via the HDMI cable
  • -r: not used in the command above but can force the video to fill the screen

looping one video forever w/ bash

With minimal alterations, and a bit of setup, one can make a bash file that runs the omxplayer loop command:

  1. On your raspberry pi make a file called loop-one.sh: nano loop-one.sh (you could vi if you prefer)

  2. Copy the following code and paste it all into your loop-one.sh file (then save and exit):

    #!/bin/sh

omxplayer -b --loop --no-osd -o hdmi /home/pi/FILENAME.mp4

  3. Make loop-one.sh executable with chmod: chmod +x loop-one.sh

  4. Run loop-one.sh with the following command ./loop-one.sh

  5. Control-C (KeyboardInterrupt) to exit loop

running loop script on startup

  1. On your pi open rc.local with nano: sudo nano /etc/rc.local
  2. Scroll until you see exit 0 at the bottom of the file and add two new lines above exit 0 (exit 0 has to be the last line in this file)
  3. Assuming you want to loop one video forever configure rc.local to run loop-one.sh with bash as a background process on boot (the & at the end of the loop is mission critical here): su -c "sh /path/to/file/loop-one.sh" pi &
  4. Save and exit
  5. Test that we configured rc.local correctly (the video should start playing): sudo /etc/rc.local
  6. Control-C to cancel playback (assuming it's working)
  7. Reboot: sudo reboot now
  8. Confirm that the looper starts up shortly after the login prompt appears. if not happen make sure loop-one.sh has been made executable (chmod +x loop-one.sh)
  9. Since the line in rc.local ends with an & one can login back into the pi and, among other things, stop the looping process from launching automatically on boot: comment out (add a # in front of) the line we just added to rc.local in order to revert to non-looping functionality. save, exit, and reboot to confirm non-looping behavior.