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PiPlayer

A relatively easy-to-use utility to set up one or more RaspberryPi's as a video player.

PiPlayer will install vlc on your Pi(s), transfer videos, and set them to play on startup.

Installation

You should have one or more Pi's on your local network. The Pi's should have:

• the latest raspbian with console only install
• auto-login enabled
• passwordless authentication with ssh keys

On your computer, install PiPlayer with:

pip install piplayer

Usage

Basic usage

You can send one or more videos directly to individual Pi's like so:

piplayer --host HOSTNAME --video VIDEONAME.mp4

This will transfer the video file(s) to the Pi, and make them play on startup in a loop. The --video option can take multiple video files.

Project file

For more complex scenarios, you can also create project instructions as a YAML file. Here's an example project file:

players:
  - host: player1.local
    videos: vid1.mp4
  - host: player2.local
    videos: ["vid2.mp4", "vid3.mp4"]

To use:

piplayer --project PROJECTFILE.yaml

Required settings:

players is an array, containing at minimum a host and video entry.

host: the hostname or ip of the Pi on the local network

videos: the local path(s) to video files to be sent to the Pi
This can be a single video, an array, or a glob pattern (like myvids/*.mp4).

Optional settings:

The following settings are optional:

loop: should the playlist loop?
Can be true or false. Defaults to true.

random: play the videos in random order
Can be true or false. Defaults to false.

user: the username on the Pi
Defaults to pi.

gap: (TODO!) time in seconds to pause between each video (shows a black screen)
Defaults to 0.0.

start_at: (TODO!) start the playlist at a specific time.
Defaults to 0.0.

If you want to apply the same settings to all the Pi's, add a settings dictionary like so:

settings:
    user: cooluser 
    random: true
    gap: 2

These settings will be sent to all the Pi's listed in the players section (but individual player settings have precedence).