Introduction

PiVLC is an operating system that turns your Raspberry Pi minicomputer into a simple media player. It is available as a disk image and requires minimum amount of steps for you to get it going.

Requirements

• You will need a Raspberry Pi 4 and a 4K screen for 4K video experience.
• It is best to use a Class 10 SD card with at least 4GB capacity.

Setup

Warning! Do not power up Raspberry Pi before it s mentioned as a step below.

1. Download the PiVLC disk image.
2. Use Raspberry Pi Imager to set up the SD card.
3. Put your videos in the videos folder of your USB flash drive.
4. Insert SD card into your Raspberry Pi.
5. Insert USB flash drive into your Raspberry Pi.
6. Make sure your screen is connected.
7. Power up the Raspberry Pi.

Your videos should appear on the screen and play back in a loop.

Audio

Raspberry Pi is a tricky piece of hardware when it comes to audio. When display is connected, HDMI audio output is considered the default. But what if you need audio from the headphone jack?

Choose Output

1. Connect USB keyboard to one of the USB ports.
2. Boot up your Pi.
3. Press Ctrl+C to kill the video.
4. Type raspi-config and hit Enter to open the official Pi configuration tool.
5. Select 1 System Options and then S2 Audio.
6. Choose your preferred audio auput and hit Enter.
7. Use Tab key to highlight the Finish button and hit Enter.
8. Type sudo reboot and hit Enter to finalize.

Your Pi should reboot and start playing audio through the output you selected. Now, it could be that the volume is a bit too low.

Set Volume

1. Connect USB keyboard to one of the USB ports.
2. Boot up your Pi.
3. Press Ctrl+C to kill the video.
4. Type alsamixer and hit Enter to enter the audio mixer.
5. Use arrow keys < and > to select the audio card.
6. Use arrow keys up and down to set the volume.
7. Hit Esc to exit.
8. Type sudo reboot and hit Enter to finalize.

If the audio is still too low, consider using an external amplifier or tuning the one that you already have.

Final Notes

PiVLC started as an experiment and the initial intention was not to get it even this far. But as the experiment succeeds and creative juices start to flow at incredible speeds, there is just no other way than to let them flow.

With that in mind, congratulate the fact with a HURRAH, suggest improvements via GitLab Project Issues and donate to make them happen.