Intro
I’m looking to test my old Raspberry Pi model 3 to see if it can play mp4 videos I recorded on my Samsung Galaxy A51 smartphone. I had assumed it would get overwhelmed and give up, but I haven’t tried in many years, so… The first couple videos did play, sort of. I was using vlc. Now if you’ve seen any of my posts you know I’ve written a zillion posts on running a dynamic slideshow based on RPi. Though the most important of these posts was written years ago, it honestly still runs and runs well to this day, amazingly enough. Usually technology changes or hardware breaks. But that didn’t happen. Every day I enjoy a brand new slideshow in my kitchen.
In most of my posts I use the old stalwart program fbi. In fact I don’t even have XWindows installed – it’s not a requirement if you know what you’re doing. But as far as I can see, good ‘ole fbi doesn’t do streaming media such as videos in mp4 format. As far as I know, vlc is more modern and most importantly, better supported. So after a FAIL trying with mplayer (still haven’t diagnose that one), I switched to trials with vlc.
I haven’t gotten very far, and that’s why I wanted to share my learnings. There’s just so much you can do with vlc, that even what you may think are the most common things anyone would want are very hard to find working examples for. So that’s where I plan to contribute to the community. As I figure out an ‘easy” thing, I will add it here. And if I’m the only one who ever refers to this post, so be it. I love my own My favorite python tips, post, for instance. it has everything I use on a regular basis. So I’m thinking this will be similar.
2 replies on “vlc command-line tips”
I spent some time trying to use vlc command line to set up my mother-in-law with photos and video on a multiscreen system based on a raspberry pi 4. I don’t recommend vlc for multi-monitor systems unless you are trying to do one of the scenarios they have already gotten running. I have moved over to mpv which does not have as much to consider in special effects, but does have simple controls for deciding what shows on a particular monitor.
Thanks, kind contributor. I never did establish much control over vlc and then lost interest! Maybe I’ll look at mpv next if you say you got it to work. I had expected to get vlc to work, then when it wasn’t a walk in the park assumed it was due to some character flaw on my part. Who knows.