PiBox » VideoFE

This can be handled by using the DBus interface using OpenUri. It will require launching the player and knowing when it's done playing the current video. This requires additional DBus interfaces that run while VideoFE runs - ie it queries and manages omxplayer on a continues basis.

• Get video length: Duration
  • This has to be run immediately after OpenUri
• Get current position: Position
  • This is queried continuously until position matches Duration
• Call OpenURI with the next video
• Repeat

The Duration and Position can also be handled with a single call: Status

The trick will be to pause the video right at the end, like on the last frame. Alternatively, the player can just finish the video and sit waiting for another command (like Exit). This may require modifying omxplayer itself to support a "Don't Exit" option.

Note that VideoFE has it's own dbuscontrol.sh script right now. It would need to be updated to support any additional commands.

Moving this up to the 1.1 release because I think I could fix this fairly easily. I will want to create a patch to a specific GIT hash, however, so I won't be pulling from master again (unless/until I can push any changes upstream).

Okay, it's not so obvious how to fix this in omxplayer. I don't quite see how the inbound dbus message resets the player to start on a new file. I can see how the file is set in main() but not how it gets reset via dbus.

So the first thing to try will be to start omxplayer running via videofe (in the media server) and try to change the video manually (via an updated dbuscontrol.sh) and see what happens. Also, use the modified dbuscontrol.sh pause the playing video and get the status information to see how we can tell we're at the end.

I experimented with the dbus interface. It works quite nicely so no need to modify omxplayer to run a playlist.

I've added "status" and "openuri" cases to dbuscontrol.sh in the videofe tree. This script is only installed in kiosks and auto-kiosks because normally videofe is used to choose the next video. I tested both status and openuri and they work fine.

The status return data is in microseconds for Duration and Position.

1. Add a timer that goes off each second to get status.
2. Check if the difference between Duration and Position is < 5000000 (5 seconds - this could be configurable).
3. If yes, start the next video with openuri
   1. then restart the timer

That's all there is to it. Fine tuning is possible using a configurable option that could be set in seconds or milliseconds (to get 1.5 seconds, for example).

This works now but introduces a different problem: FF past the end of the video causes omxplayer to exit.

The way to handle this is to check how much time is left and only do the FF if it's >X seconds. But only do this on kiosks because we can FF past the end of a video in media center mode and it does the right thing (returns to playlist).

Another problem I found is that the MOV files generated by my camera did not work with omxplayer when trying to get the duration and position info. Converting them to mp4 with ffmpeg fixed that problem.

Next up is test that I didn't break media center mode with these changes.

• Media system mode
• kiosk mode
• auto-kiosk mode.

It's a nice improvement on the playback since I don't have to restart omxplayer every time I get a new video to play.

Changes committed and pushed.
Closing issue.