can videos be played from a usb stick?

[newuser3000]

can I play an mp4 file from a usb stick on my pi? I have heard talk of something called 'omxplayer' but being a linux/RPi noob I have no idea how to use this or if it it's even what I'm looking for
any advice?

[dextrus]

Yes you can.

What OS are you using? Is it Raspbian? You might want to consider trying XBMC on the PI which is designed to playback audio and video files and is really easy to use.

There are three variants that I know of: Raspbmc, Xbian and OpenELEC.

[KenT]

If you plug in the usb stick you will see an entry appear on the left hand panel of the Filemanager.

Click on this entry and find the directory containing the file you want to play

open a terminal window in this directory >tools>open terminal window

type omxplayer -o hdmi filename or omxplayer -o local filename for analogue out

[newuser3000]

when i put in 'omxplayer -o local (file name)' i get:

have a nice day

whatdo i do here?

[KenT]

try 128 MB RAM, use sudo raspi-config

look in omxplayer.log using leafpad. The file should be in the directory that you ran omxplayer from

post the command you typed here.

[PS1981]

If you just get told "Have a nice day" then the video is either finished or it didn't work. I had a problem playing from my stick, then I realised that the name of the stick, and hence the command to play for example " omxplayer stick/videos/myvideo.mp4" had a space in it (was "store n go" or something). I renamed the stick "STICK" and now it works.

[topguy]

File-names with space in them can be used if you:
- use " around the whole name: "/media/store n go/movie.mp4"
- or use \ in front of spaces: /media/store\ n\ go/movie.mp4

( the \ character is called "escape" and has to be used if filename contains strange characters. ( space ! $ \ ) )