rpitv-player

Rotate a bunch of videos and titles. Uses omxplayer and pngview on Raspberry Pi.

Installation

• Install node.js and npm. If installing npm from Debian, upgrade npm: sudo npm install -g npm
• Make sure you have omxplayer, pngview, and ImageMagick's convert installed somewhere on your PATH.
  • See other RPITV repositories at github for patched versions of omxplayer and pngview.
• From this directory, sudo npm link (someday... sudo npm install rpitv-player?)
• Install rpitv-disable-tty1: sudo install -m 755 rpitv-disable-tty1 /usr/local/bin
  • this is used to disable the cursor and clear the terminal before videos are shown
  • make sure that the user account that rpitv-player will run under has permission to run this via sudo with no password - on Raspbian this works by default for the pi user.
• Create a couple directories:
  • sudo mkdir /etc/rpitv-player /var/cache/rpitv-player
  • sudo chown yourUser:yourGroup /etc/rpitv-player /var/cache/rpitv-player
• Install systemd service:
  • sudo cp rpitv-player.service /etc/systemd/system
  • sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  • sudo systemctl enable rpitv-player.service
• Create some JSON files in /etc/rpitv-player before proceeding further (see below)
• Start service: sudo service rpitv-player start

Playlist/Configuration

The rpitv-player script looks for .json files in /etc/rpitv-player. There are two "special" files: live.json (which takes precedence over all other videos) and config.json (which defines some global parameters). Besides its precedence there is nothing else special about live.json. More on config.json below.

The JSON files look like this:

{
	"url": "rtmp://video1.rpitv.org:1935/rpitv-vod/20140322_domino_squad_dcc-4400.mp4",
	"titleList": [
		"The Domino Squad (2014)",
		"See this again at rpitv.org/p/684"
	]
}

They define a URL (passed verbatim to omxplayer), and a list of title strings to overlay. The global title list from config.json is appended to the title list and the resulting list of titles is shown in sequence. Each title is shown for a time of 10 seconds unless this is overridden in config.json.

config.json looks like this:

{
	"titleDuration": 10000,
	"globalTitles" : [
		"Join us! Meetings Tuesdays 9pm Union 3202",
		"More free content at rpitv.org",
		"Want us to cover your event? rpitv@union.rpi.edu"
	]
}

where globalTitles is appended to each video's titleList, and titleDuration is the time for which each title is shown before proceeding to the next (in milliseconds).

When creating or removing JSON files, follow up with a sudo service rpitv-player restart. The script caches the list of files so it's necessary to do this before changes will be seen. As an exception, live.json will be picked up at the end of each video.

Volume Control

It's possible to control the volume based on the time of day with a config.json like the following (setting quietStart, quietEnd, and quietVolume). This lowers the volume between 22:00 and 08:00 the following day:

{
	"normalVolume" : 5000,
	"quietVolume" : 2000,
	"quietStart": 22,
	"quietEnd": 8,
	"globalTitles" : [
		"Join us! Meetings Tuesdays 9pm Union 3202",
		"More free content at rpitv.org",
		"Want us to cover your event? rpitv@union.rpi.edu",
		"Follow us on Twitter @rpitv"
	]
}