PiVT is a VT playout server for Raspbery Pi, which wraps OMXPlayer to provide seamless(-ish) playback and network control. Written in Python.

Executes commands given over a network with a simple telnet interface (connect and press h <ENTER> for a list of the commands). A client, PiVTDesktop is available at https://github.com/YSTV/PiVTDesktop

git clone git://github.com/YSTV/PiVT.git

The YAML and pexpect modules for Python are required for PiVT. For Raspbian, run something like this to install them:

sudo apt-get install python-pexpect python-yaml

For smooth video playback, at least 128MB RAM must be assigned to the GPU, use raspi-config to configure this.

Configuration can either be supplied on the command line or within a YAML configuration file. A sample, config.yaml, is provided.

To specify arguments with the command line, say python PiVT.py --help for a full listing of command line options. It is not possible to set some options (such as playlists) from the command line

Ensure you can launch OMXPlayer and play a video correctly. Then do:

python PiVT.py --config config.yaml

sudo python PiVTDaemon.py start --config /absolute/path/to/file.yaml

This will start PiVT as a daemon and return immediately, it will run in the background

• Further stability improvement work to fix occasional video freeze (caused by omxplayer not shutting down correctly, now timeouts checked)
• Log level improvements

• Removed playlist feature as it was broken by Pi firmware updates
• Migrated to showing a freeze-frame of video until started
• Stability improvements

• Added a more helpful error message when no stopvideo/playlist video could be loaded at all
• Version number now shown as part of help output

• Complete rewrite to hook OMXPlayer using pexpect and Python
• Significantly increased stability and reduced random crashes, added error handling and recovery
• Playlist can be set in config file in place of a single stop video - will loop continuously for digital signage applications unless overridden by network
• Added auto mode to play next loaded video immediately instead of returning to playlist
• Added seamless loop mode for stop videos which line up exactly, provided suitable OMXPlayer version installed (see above)
• Added daemonisation system to run PiVT with console disconnected
• File list now maintained internally and updated periodically, retrieval of list for clients is much faster
• Bugs when changing file types now resolved
• Configuration can be loaded from text file or set on command line
• Reduced delays switching between videos
• Added option to log to file

All credit to Edgar Hucek and Petr Baudis (and others!) for the underlying video playing software, see http://github.com/popcornmix/omxplayer