rpi-vlc-kiosk

1- play inline commands urls videos

2- play downloaded videos systemctl job

Installing the OS

Install a version of Raspbian Lite (Minimal image based on Debian Buster). You can head over to : https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ and follow the instructions.

Once the image is downloaded, you can burn it to your SD card with tools like Etcher (https://www.balena.io/etcher/)

1- You need to connect the pi to an external monitor and keyboard during the setup phase.
2- insert your micro sd card into RPI and plug-in power cable

Connect your raspberry pi

First login

user: pi
password: raspberry

Configuration

sudo raspi-config

• change pi password

• change hostname

• set wifi ssid and pass

• set timezone

• inferface opt -> SSH enable (you need to set a new password to open)

• Boot Options -> Console Autologin

• finish -> reboot

Updates

Applying latest versions

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
reboot

Installing VLC Player

sudo apt-get install vlc

Play inline command urls

Download the video you want to play on your booth. Since we will be using vlc (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/), your video should have a format that is supported by vlc.

Before we start, let's know the options that will work for us important: to use VLC from the command line without the default interface, then you can do so by swapping out the vlc command with cvlc.

--fullscreen: full screen video
--loop, -L: loop videos
--no-osd: hide video title
--no-audio: muted video
--no-mouse-events or --no-cursor: disable cursor
.
.
.

You can reach more: https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Command_line/#Receiving_a_network_stream

Let's try what we learned

in terminal:

cvlc --fullscreen --loop --no-osd --no-audio http://www.example.org/your_file.mpg http://www.example.org/your_file2.mpg

You should be seeing videos on the screen you are connected to.

We are done it !

Play downloaded videos

Download the video you want to play on your booth. Since we will be using vlc (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/), your video should have a format that is supported by vlc. Open up a terminal, and you can copy the video to your Pi with the following command : scp path_to_your_video/your_video.mp4 [email protected]:~ This will copy your video to the home directory of your Raspberry Pi.

Create a background job that will start playing your video when booting your Pi

We are going to create a background job that your operating system will launch at each boot of your Pi. To do so, we are creating a systemd unit file that will have this content :

[Unit]
Description=rpiKiosk

[Service]
User=pi
Environment="DISPLAY=:0"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/vlc -Rf path_to_your_video.mp4
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

We created a systemd service that we call rpiKiosk.

• We add a User field as VLC is not supposed to be started as the root user.
• We add an environment variable called DISPLAY so that the video plays on the HDMI output of the Pi.
• We use the -Rf flag in the vlc command so that the video plays in full screen and on repeat.

Connect to your raspberry Pi over ssh :

ssh [email protected]

Use your favorite text editor to create the unit file :

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/rpiKiosk.service

Copy/Paste the unit file we described earlier. Enable the service to auto-start on boot.

sudo systemctl enable rpiKiosk.service 

To start the service :

sudo systemctl start rpiKiosk.service 

To view the latest logs, use sudo journalctl -xfu rpiKiosk.service

To view the current service status, use sudo systemctl status rpiKiosk.service

We are done it !