After finding amazing VLC Remote app (and being sick) I decided to build a "Movie Center" out of Raspberry Pi. Main objectives were:
- Make my laptop usable while watching movies on TV
- Usable by a non-tech person (even after unexpected reboot one can turn on mobile app and play a movie)
- Serves as a shared network disk (for Windows computers)
Used PIXEL image. Beside setting hostname and password turn on SSH (and VNC) for remote access.
The most painful thing to do as VLC installed with apt-get install vlc will choke on basically anything.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=59814&hilit=vlc
Additionally adjust following settings (NSIN = not sure if needed):
- [Audio] Output device: bcm2835 ALSA Direct hardware device without any conversions
- Demux module: Avformat demuxer
- Stream output muxer caching: 10000 [NSIN]
- File caching: 5000
[Audio] Output device works for me as Pi is plugged in to Denon AVR, guess it may differ when plugged to TV directly.
Settings not mentioned in the original tutorial are to make rewind/forward work (otherwise they were freezing on a frame with audio going on). Worked fine for me with 1080p movie, file cache may be increased further if pixelated-few-colours frames are showing up too often.
~/.config/autostart/autovlc.desktop :
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=vlc
For NTFS rw: apt-get install ntfs-3g and remount disk.
In [global] section change:
- workgroup = WORKGROUP
- wins support = yes
Some of settings in my share config may be superfluous, haven't tidied up after experimenting and trying to make it work
[Movies]
comment=Movies
path=/media/pi/movies
browseable=Yes
read only=no
writeable=Yes
only guest=no
guest ok=Yes
create mask=0777
directory mask=0777
public=Yes
force user=pi