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A Foolproof Raspberry Pi Media Player

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-play-the-file-already dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket submitted a link to an interesting hackaday story about a DIY video player. The approach taken is very simple, using a Raspberry Pi to do all of the heavy lifting. There's also no user interface. The Pi scans for any removable media that has been inserted, and if it finds something it automatically plays the video files contained on the card. For anyone interested in building a no-frills, portable video player this might just be the ticket.

The project is detailed on github for those who might be interested.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday November 24 2019, @11:47PM (6 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday November 24 2019, @11:47PM (#924318) Journal

    RPi4 should decode pretty much anything thrown at it, once whatever OS it's using (e.g. Raspbian or LibreELEC) has been updated.

    The lack of AV1 hardware decode on anything is annoying. It missed the window for RPi4, and I doubt it's coming to Ryzen 4000 APUs (Zen 2 + Navi?) in January. Unfortunately, parasites have crawled out of the woodwork and are threatening to shake down anybody who deploys AV1:

    https://www.ibc.org/manage/av1-codec-wars-erupt/3737.article [ibc.org]
    https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130840 [streamingmedia.com]
    https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130849 [streamingmedia.com]

    It's unclear how much improvement AV1 will deliver over H.265. It might be on par [bbc.co.uk] or up to 20% better. The real fight might be VVC/H.266 [wikipedia.org] vs. AV1 or AV2. A rapidly developing H.266 and patent trolls may crush the dream of a dominant open and royalty-free codec.

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  • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @01:29AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @01:29AM (#924356)

    once whatever OS it's using (e.g. Raspbian or LibreELEC)

    LibreELEC != OS [libreelec.tv]

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 25 2019, @02:18AM (4 children)

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Monday November 25 2019, @02:18AM (#924363) Journal

      It is an operating system (Linux distribution) intended for installation on SD cards. The tagline even says "Just enough OS for Kodi".

      LibreELEC is a lightweight ‘Just enough OS’ Linux distribution purpose-built for Kodi on current and popular mediacentre hardware.

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      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @04:08AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @04:08AM (#924393)

        It is an operating system (Linux distribution) intended for installation on SD cards. The tagline even says "Just enough OS for Kodi".

                LibreELEC is a lightweight ‘Just enough OS’ Linux distribution purpose-built for Kodi on current and popular mediacentre hardware.

        Yep. You were right and I was wrong [distrowatch.com].

        I played with LibreELEC a bit a while back, and while I did use a LibreELEC ISO, it wasn't clear to me that it was a distinct distribution.

        Had I found that it met my needs (that's not a knock on LibreElec, I just didn't like it all that much), I likely would have found that out when I attempted to install it on my preferred distribution.

        Mea culpa.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday November 25 2019, @04:21AM (2 children)

          by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Monday November 25 2019, @04:21AM (#924397) Journal

          IMO: It's best for people who already like to use Kodi, particularly with addons. I put LibreELEC on 2GB RPi4s hooked up to TVs, which can be controlled with the TV's remote using HDMI CEC, and use a 4GB RPi4 with Raspbian for desktop stuff.

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          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @09:28PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @09:28PM (#924644)

            I looked at Kodi and by default it seemed to want to automatically connect to various servers without asking me, which I didn't like. Other than that, I couldn't see anything much useful to me that VLC couldn't provide. I certainly didn't need it to download media. I can use a web browser and / or a file transfer client for that.