Make a USB Video Looper with a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B

Thanks James,

I’ll have a play & see if I can get it working.

Cheers,

Richard

3 Likes

Hello!

Everything works perfectly but how can i do to have the countdown and the videos in a portrait position? My display is already set up in portrait so it might be specific to the video looper?

Thank you all for your help :wink:

3 Likes

Hey Thomas,

I’ll shoot a message to @Tim to see whether he knows straight away. Although I’d suggest trying to using this command to edit your config.txt and update the line display_rotate=1

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Hit CTRL+X then Y then ENTER to save the changes to the file and then restart your Pi

3 Likes

Strangely, I’ve got the opposite problem. I’ve got a 3.5 inch display hooked up, as well as a single HDMI – and the videos play only on the 3.5! (AND naturally I want to figure out how to reverse the situation!) Also pretty noobish here, though. Just chiming in.

1 Like

Hi Dan,

Strange indeed! So your Pi will happily output console to both the 3.5 LCD and HDMI, but defaults to the frame buffer of the 3.5 LCD?

I had a dig for a config option in the video looper, but I’ll have to dig a little deeper it seems.

Keen to get to the bottom of this one!
-James

Yep! When just using the Gui I have the HDMI set up as a second monitor, but when auto launching into the video looper, it doesn’t show on the HDMI

1 Like

hi m name is sam im from the uk an i would like to find out how to take countdown off video looper as it would be better for my protect without it thank you

1 Like

Hi Sam, Welcome to the forum!

Try editing the /assets/video_looper.conf file and removing the startsecs=5 from the file, or replacing it with startsecs=0

Let us know how you go!
-James

2 Likes

Hi James that doesn’t mean anything to me how would I change them settings I’m totally new to this sorry about this thanks

Hi I get to number 3 program video looper and I get command not found any ideas thanks

Hi Sam,

Easy peasy!

Hi I get to number 3 program video looper and I get command not found any ideas thanks

Could you go into into a bit more detail into the above, I don’t think I’m picking up what you’re putting down :frowning:

Let us know how you go either way!
-James

2 Likes

Hi I went into the terminal box top left and put in the 1st two lines you sent but the 3rd line said no command I am new to this but I’m doing a jumanji board so I want video looper to start as soon as the pi gets power hope you can help thank you

Hi Sam,

Seems you were trying to run the lines in the file I told you to edit. You should find the text file you need to edit in the folder assets within the project folder you cloned (pi_video_looper) in the tutorial.

For a one-liner:
sudo nano ~/pi_video_looper/assets/video_looper.conf

And remove the line specified in my previous post

-James

3 Likes

Thanks James think I know what you mean as I say it’s my 1st project and I’m an old man lol never done anything like this before I’ll let you know when I’ve done work thanks

4 Likes

Thanks for the looper. Really handy. I’m just receiving the following error when I run 1. sudo ./install.sh:
‘cannot create regular file ‘/etc/supervisor/conf.d/’ : No such file or directory’

Any thoughts on what’s causing that? I’ve flashed the SD card with the Buster image as per the article. Thanks

1 Like

Hi Tony,

Interesting error! Taking a look at the install script, there are two relevant lines:


Here you can see supervisor is supposed to be installed alongside all the other dependencies (More info on supervisor here if interested, it’s basically a scheduler of processes like init but to do with a particular project, rather than the whole Linux system)

image
Later in the install script, you can see that files get copied over to the /supervisor/conf.d directory, a directory likely created during the supervisor install.

Now onto investigating that missing directory - try running sudo apt update then sudo apt install supervisor, and see what it says (whether it says it’s already installed or not). If it seems to be already installed, then you may just need to touch /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ to create an empty one for cp to move stuff into. Worth knowing too that a .d file is basically just a directory, but one used to store config files specifically. There’s more to it, but I’m not savvy to it.

Give that a go and let us know what you find!
-James

1 Like

Thanks James, running Sudo apt install supervisor followed by . sudo ./install.sh again fixed the issue and it’s working fine. Appreciate your help.

2 Likes

Hi James I have done as you’ve said in your posts and removed the =5 to 0 and still counting down is there anything else I could try Sorry for been a pain thanks

2 Likes

Hi Sam,

Could you copy and paste your config file into the forum? Maybe the config file is no longer valid and it, and it’s going back to some default or the like.

If that doesn’t turn up anything, we may be able to run a simple test setup here, and see what’s required to get it working how you like.

Keen to get to the bottom of this one!
-James

I’ve installed Video Looper on a new Pi 4 running Buster and it appears to complete the install successfully but rather than displaying the “Insert USB drive with compatible movies” message the screen flashes black twice and then remains on an open terminal. If I then reboot it fails to load the OS and just boots to a blank terminal screen as per the below image. I have successfully installed Video Looper on another machine previously but I’ve tried this one twice with the same results.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

3 Likes