Here is a nice week-end project, useful for automatic presentations, restaurant menus and waiting room video entertainment/marketing/information (my case).

I used a 32″ TV with a Raspberry Pi B (512 Mb RAM), a Wifi Adapter and a 64 Gb SD card (40 $CND at Costco) to create a simple video looping device.

My goal is simple, I want to use SFTP to upload videos in a folder, and have a simple Debian service loop and play each video file one by one.

Since I am not always here to restart the service, a simple reboot of the Pi (by unplugging) should restart the whole thing. No technical knowledge required !

Here is how I done it:

1. Create nice corporate information slide deck
   • I suggest creating a visually interesting Powerpoint Presentation, with FULLY automated transitions and animation.
   • Test the presentation in Powerpoint.
   • Once it is perfectly tuned, export the Powerpoint to a MP4 video (sadly, only possible on Windows, not MAC OS)
2. Setup the system
   • Install Raspbian with NOOBS on my 64Gb SD Card
   • Log-in with the pi user
   • If needed, setup wifi
     • type : startx
     • In LXDE, use the “Wifi” tool to setup the network
     • Exit LXDE
     • Reboot (sudo shutdown -r 0)
   • As a principle, I always upgrade the debian package and install vim (both are optional)
     • sudo aptitude upgrade
     • sudo aptitude install vim ctags
   • As we will use the CLI based Raspberry Pi Video player, omxplayer, there is no need for other software.
3. Create the looping “application” (2 scripts and a folder)
   • Create a /home/pi/movies folder
   • Use your favorite SFTP client (ex: Mozilla) to push the corporate and other movie files to the Pi
   • Create the loop script (mine is named ~/declicTV/videoplayer.sh):

4. mkdir /home/pi/declicTV
   cd /home/pi/declicTV
   vi videoplayer.sh

The code is greatly inspired from here.
I have made a few improvements:

#!/bin/sh
#first version from http://www.cenolan.com/2013/03/looping-video-playlist-omxplayer-raspberry-pi/

# set here the path to the directory containing your videos
VIDEOPATH="/home/pi/movies" 

# you can normally leave this alone
SERVICE="omxplayer"
SERVICE_OPTS="-o hdmi -n 3 -b"

# now for our infinite loop!
while true; do
        if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $SERVICE > /dev/null
        then
        sleep 1;
else
        for file in $VIDEOPATH/*
        do
                #debug
                echo $SERVICE $SERVICE_OPTS "$file"
                
                #Display Files
                $SERVICE $SERVICE_OPTS "$file"
        done
fi
done

• Then, it is a simple matter of adding a script to init.d, just like explained here.
  • Don’t forget the update-rc.d part.
  • Here is my init.d declicTV script:

#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/declicTV
# taken from http://www.debian-administration.org/article/28/Making_scripts_run_at_boot_time_with_Debian

# Some things that run always
touch /var/lock/declicTV

# Carry out specific functions when asked to by the system
case "$1" in
  start)
    echo "Starting script declicTV "
    nohup /home/pi/declicTV/videoplayer.sh > /home/pi/declicTV/videoplayer.log &
    ;;
  stop)
    echo "Stopping script declicTV"
    killall -9 -r videoplayer.sh
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/declicTV {start|stop}"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

I hope this will be helpful to you !