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adafruit / pi_video_looper

Application to turn your Raspberry Pi into a dedicated looping video playback device, good for art installations, information displays, or just playing cat videos all day.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Using 2 monitors on Pi4 #203

Open Chrisgraue opened 9 months ago

Chrisgraue commented 9 months ago

This is a feature request, but would be really cool:

The Pi4 has two HDMI outputs. I'd love to be able to send either a split video (a single 3840x1080 video) or two videos (each 1920x1080) to different monitors at the same time.

I found one person who worked out an implementation of this for OMXplayer, but only wrote it for a single video. Perhaps if the looper has something that could be used to dynamically change which video is targeted in this? It might be a starting point.

DISPLAY=:0 xterm -e omxplayer --display=2 /home/pi/Videos/video2.mp4 & omxplayer --display=7 /home/pi/Videos/video2.mp4

tofuSCHNITZEL commented 9 months ago

Since omxplayer is EOL and will not be installable in the future I would not get my hopes up (and cvlc is not an easy replacement) But the trick is to just run the video looper twice with different inis and in the inis use the extra args to have it display the video on different screens. see also here: https://github.com/adafruit/pi_video_looper/issues/100

I think the gist is: Create a second service file - you can append a path to the video looper python call that points to another ini and then you just need to figure out the exact args that omxplayer needs to display on different hdmi outputs

tofuSCHNITZEL commented 9 months ago

you can check out the readme here: https://github.com/adafruit/pi_video_looper/tree/next#raspberry-pi-45-multi-screen-output but note this is totally untested yet!

Chrisgraue commented 9 months ago

Interesting! I wonder if I could point each instance to a different folder, basically an A1 and B1 playing at the same time, A2 and B2, etc etc. If I'm lucky, hitting the controls to skip, pause, back, etc will control both of them.

tofuSCHNITZEL commented 9 months ago

yes different folders is no problem (just edit the ini of one of the instances) if KB control would control both instances I don't dare predict ;) needs to be tested ;)