omxplayer-frontend

This is a web frontend for the Raspberry Pi omxplayer media player. It is licensed under GNU GPL v3 or later and available at https://github.com/mmitch/omxplayer-frontend

omxplayer-frontend was originally written by TallOak and Krageon. This is a fork based on their omxplayer-frontend hosted over at bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/krageon/omxplayer-frontend

See the upstream branch for the original import. krageon told me it's ok to clone it to github and put the GPL on it, so I did :-) Thanks!

PROJECT STATUS

This project is on hiatus, but feel free to use it or improve it.

I might pull in a merge request, but don't expect me to be fast about it or to take everything.

I don't use omxplayer-frontend any more, so don't expect any updates from me.

I don't speak Python, so don't expect me to implement any feature requests - I'm simply not able to ;-)

PROJECT HISTORY

When I got my Raspberry Pi, I was looking for a simple media player and found omxplayer-frontend and did some minor adjustments. Remember: It's not written by me but by TallOak and krageon, I just copied it over from bitbucket to github because I don't have a bitbucket account. omxplayer-frontend was simple, easy and worked like a charm and everything was well.

After some time I was not so happy any more needing a working networking to control omxplayer-frontend. I wanted to take the Raspberry Pi to a hotel room and hook it up there and did not want to bring my own WLAN with me just to control the player. This gave birth to https://github.com/mmitch/omxplayer-console which I still use (and sometimes improved) today. It runs on the console and I control it via a cheap IR remote control that acts as a USB HID Keyboard and sends simple keypresses. No networking needed.

So omxplayer-frontend is by no means a bad program, but my use case has shifted and now I need something else.

PREREQUISITES

Obviously, you'll need omxplayer. If it is not already installed on your system, it should be available via

  % apt-get install omxplayer

The preinstalled version on the Raspian images from late 2012 was too old (some commandline parameters have changed), but

  % apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

did the trick. If all else fails, get omxplayer from here:

• omxplayer source: https://github.com/popcornmix/omxplayer
• omxplayer builds: http://omxplayer.sconde.net/

You'll also need python and the Python package installer. Both should be installed by

   % apt-get install python-pip

After that, install the Python module web.py:

   % pip install web.py

INSTALLATION

Put omxplayer-frontend wherever you like. In this example, we'll put it under $HOME/git/omxplayer-frontend. The easiest way to download is to clone the repository:

   $ cd ~/git
   $ git clone git://github.com/mmitch/omxplayer-frontend.git

This will create the omxplayer-frontend subdirectory. Next, go there and create a FIFO named omxin. This will be used by omxplayerd.py to communicate with the omxplayer process. Unfortunately, a FIFO can't be checked in to git so you have to create it manually:

   $ cd ~/git/omxplayer-frontend
   $ mkfifo omxin

Next, either create a subdirectory named media in the omxplayer-frontend directory and copy your media files there or (this is more flexible and recommended) create a link named media to your existing files:

   $ cd ~/git/omxplayer-frontend
   $ ln -s /path/where/your/files/are media

Now you are ready to go and can start the omxplayer daemon:

   $ cd ~/git/omxplayer-frontend
   $ ./omxplayerd.py

omxplayerd.py will then be running on port 8080 and can be reached via http://your.ip:8080/

omxplayerd.py itself should run perfectly fine with normal user permissions. If you can't play videos, check if you can run omxplayer as a normal user - if this works only as root, either change the permissions on the video and audio devices or run omxplayerd.py as root. Running as root is generally not a very good idea, but on a small system for video-only use it might be acceptable.

Root permissions will also be necessary for shutting down your system via omxplayerd.py, see SHUTDOWN below.

PROPER INSTALLATION

AUTOSTART

To automatically start omxplayerd.py on boot, you could write initscripts or add omxplayerd.py to /etc/inittab, but the easiest way is a crontab entry. Open your crontab via crontab -e and add a line like this:

   @reboot cd git/omxplayer-frontend; ./omxplayerd.py > /tmp/omxplayerd.log

If you want to run omxplayerd.py as root, add this to root's crontab. In that case, the logfile should be at /var/log/omxplayerd.log

SHUTDOWN

The web frontend has a small link at the bottom (sometimes just below the visible page) that allows system shutdown. This is intended for systems that don't have any keyboard attached and where you don't want to open an SSH session to power down (eg. when controlling omxplayerd.py via browser from your smartphone).

For this to work properly, omxplayerd.py has to be run as root (beware of the security implications).

If you want use sudo(1) instead or just create a file that is checked regularly by another job running as root (root's crontab perhaps), have a look at class Shutdown in omxplayerd.py and adjust the subprocess.call() accordingly.

PORT CHANGE

By default, omxplayerd.py will run on port 8080. If you want another port (say, the default HTTP port 80 when you have no other webserver running, so you don't have to enter the :8080 in the URL), add the port number as a parameter to omxplayerd.py

   $ cd ~/git/omxplayer-frontend
   $ ./omxplayerd.py 80

Of course, this can also be done in a crontab.

UPDATES

Let git update the repository:

   $ cd ~/git/omxplayer-frontend
   $ git update

If it finds updates and downloads them, you shold restart the running omxplayerd.py. The most simple way to do this is a reboot if omxplayerd.py is started automatically. Ugly but working :)