Raspberry Pi Hacks

Chapter 5. Multimedia Hacks

One of the first things many people do with their Raspberry Pis is to set up an XMBC media center. If that’s where you’d like to start as well, we’ve got you covered ([Hack #54]).

But there’s a lot more you can do in the multimedia realm with this fun little device. Why limit it to being the media server when you can take it on the road and use it for in-car entertainment ([Hack #55])? You can also turn it into a radio ([Hack #49]), play your favorite childhood video games ([Hack #51]), jazz up your next party with a photobooth ([Hack #53]), and more.

Hack 46. Play Video Files

Want to watch a video on your Raspberry Pi? Using the right software will help you get the best performance on playback, even from HD 1080p files!

The Raspberry Pi is not quite the same as a normal computer, but one thing that it can do very well is video decoding. On your Linux laptop, when you play a video file, you are probably decoding that file entirely in software. This works fine, because your laptop CPU is fast enough to do this work in real-time. The Raspberry Pi CPU is not generally fast enough to do this, though, so to make up for it, the Broadcom 2835 system-on-chip graphics processing unit (GPU) includes dedicated hardware to decode (and encode) video files. You can access this hardware through the VideoCore libraries, but most of the video player software commonly used on Linux does not yet have support for those libraries.

Enter omxplayer, a video player specifically made ...