For Christmas, I got a raspberry pi 2, which I love.

But what to do with my old pis?  Obviously, having an old one around doing a useful job of motion capture, streamed straight out to the web.

But what about the other one?  What can be usefully done with a small computer with a HDMI output.

Necessity is the mother of invention

One of my volunteering roles, is helping my union to get more recruits and inform current members on what we can do for them.

Which is great, but one person on a stall can only talk to one person.  One person had volunteered their media player and we used that to stream a loop of videos.

Unfortunately, that only worked temporarily, so my spare pi is being drafted to do the same job.

Easy?

Well, I want the video to run on start up, without the need to do anything else.  Kiosk mode.

Editing the pi’s /etc/rc.local will run a script.  Omxplayer (included by default on the pi) will play the mp4s choosen for the task.

Using ffprobe, ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -sexagesimal -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 *.mp4 will allow me to work out how many times the loop needs to run for an hour on the stall (the sum of the videos was a little under 5 minutes, so looping the three videos 13 times should fit the bill).

Only one issue to solve before the 4th Jan: how do I stop the text output.  Oh, duh, change /boot/cmdline.txt (remove logo, send output to tty3 and switch off all but the most serious error messages) and ensure that the background of the videos is black!