tvPlayer as digital props for film and TV

This is basically a media player.

Power it and it will play the first image or video on the USB stick.

With some keyboard strokes you "change the channel", now you have an interactive TV station.

Fill a USB stick with video (or image!) files; plug it in; have a fake TV. Channel number is shown when switching them, white noise is shown when nothing is available and the volume bar is there for you when you expect it. Both can be turned off on-the-fly.

Control it with a wireless keyboard and your actress ort actor can press what they want, you'll be sure they find their program as per the script.

What you can do

• You can set inpoints for each video, so when you switch channels, it starts directly at the key moment, like when the journalist says, "...some minor accident today in the hospital of Dunwich was contained and we have nothing to worry about. Now to the weather.."
• You can turn the TV fake-off ("blackout").
• You can switch video-fitting-mode from contain to stretch to cover, to get rid of potential letterboxes.
• You can turn off the fancy effects.
• The files do not auto-progress from one to another. Each video loops itself until you "switch the channel" (play the next file on the USB device).
• Change the brightness of the video to match exposure times of the camera.
• If everythings lost, theres a green screen button

Hardware

Tested successfully on Raspberry 4 (Debian bullseye).

Raspberry pi 3 (Debian Bookworm 32bit) did not work. Very stuttery but very plausibly i'm doin something wrong.

Combine it with a HDMI-to-RCA adapter and a RCA-to-RF adapter to display on an old TV. Even sound works!

Get this up and running

1. Clone this repo git clone https://github.com/falue/tvPlayer
2. run the install script sudo bash install.sh to:
   • apt-get update
   • install dependencies (Packages: mpv, socat, wmctrl; Python: pygame, natsort)
   • auto-run python3 autostart.py on autostart[*]
   • disable window "removable medium is inserted" [BUG!]
   • create a desktop shortcut to the program
3. Set audio output to HDMI (right click on audio in toolbar, choose HDMI)
4. disable pop up window "removable medium is inserted": Open any folder > Edit > Preferences > Volume Management > uncheck Show available options for removable media when they are inserted
5. Insert USB, start watching TV.

[*] The autostart.py script asks if you want to close all other autostarting windows and after a 12s timeout, it starts the main script tvPlayer.py. This is because other windows can overlap the tvPlayer and hinder the fullscreen mode. So without a keyboard and doing anything, the player goes to fullscreen on startup.

File handling

MPV player: Playable media

The media player MPV (doc wiki) used here can play pretty much everything - however, filename-endings are fixed to work with .mp4, .mkv, .avi, .mxf and .mov (case insensitive).

It uses ffmpeg to decode, so the list of playable media is huge. According to the mpv.io website:

File Formats: mpv supports a wide variety of media formats, including popular video files (e.g., MP4, MKV), audio codecs (e.g., AAC, MP3), and subtitles.

Some cherry picked examples:

• Containers: MP4, MKV, AVI, WebM, OGG, FLV, and more.
• Video Codecs: H.264, HEVC, VP8, VP9, AV1, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, and others.
• Audio Codecs: AAC, MP3, Vorbis, FLAC, Opus, AC3, and DTS. Subtitle Formats: SRT, ASS, SSA, VTT, and embedded subtitle tracks in containers like MKV.

Manually tested:

• [x] .mp4 MPEG-4 AAC, H264
• [x] .avi MPEG-4 mp3
• [x] .mkv h264, yuv420p
• [x] .mxf mpeg2video (4:2:2), yuv422p
• [x] .mp4 HEVC, H265
• [x] .mov H264
• [x] .mkv "4k UHD" h264 yuv420p works (but stuttering on raspberry pi4 @8gb)

Also works with images!

Filetypes for images: .png, .gif, .tiff, .bmp

NOTICE: Does not work with .jpg!

NOTICE: .png does not work with color mode: "indexed colors"!

USB drive format

Works with FAT32. EXFAT has worked before and does now, but you have to run the thing with sudo all the way.

Not tested any other.

File and TV channel order

The order of the files on the USB device lead the order of the TV channels.

The alphabetically first file (case insensitive, numbers before letters) is the first channel, etc.

If you want to change the order, rename the files approprietly.

Channel number and volume bar styling

If you want to change the appearance of the channel numbers or the volume bar, you have to update the .bgra files in /channel_numbers and /volume_bars.

You can edit the pngs and convert them to .bgra files. Change the variable input_folder in it first, and then run bash script python3 png_to_bgra.py to convert the files.

Note: For simplicity, keep the image sizes the same as they are hard coded. Otherwise you have make changes to the script (change the parameters of both display_image(...) instances)

Transparency

Complete black pixels will become transparent. If you want "black" to show up, use rgb(1,1,1).

Keyboard controls