Building a sort of media player on a schedule

[DjBoBo]

Hi everyone,

I am working on a project, a sort of dedicated media player.
This will be a box left unattended in shop, connected to the monitor on the checkout counter for displaying my shop's offers. I have built similar functionality with x86 Intel, and vaapi for fullhd playback, so i don't mind compiling, cross compiling etc..
The goal is to get rid of all the proprietary annoying software, and create a free software for these types of applications. There will be no interaction (touchscreen, BT, WiFi etc...) it will just do it's job and display ads.

Project Goals:
- small form factor - covered by Pi
- low, no maintenance - covered by Pi
- automated upgrades - crontab & apt - easy
- watchdog - covered by Pi
- play video in defined window size or full HD - TBD
- schedule done via csv - trivial
- VNC to view HDMI output - trivial
- LAN management - trivial
- one box - having the Pi and other hardware in one box

Nice to have:
- Flash playback - flash has a nice feature for using external data (XML), this can be used to display available stock or other information in a central database
- Overlay - adding a layer over the video, perhaps clock, checkout counter state(open/closed)


Now the Pi Related questions:
1. Video player - Witch player can be started with command line arguments and run either fullhd or windowed to specific size. (for x86 i used mplayer, and mplayer vaapi, any one got it running on Pi )

2. Wine
- if so, what is the overhead, eg. cpu load, is it worth it or is it a cpu killer
- if not some display specific apps may have to be rewritten or reverse engineered (done this before, will do again)

3. X Server
- for x86 i used Xorg without any manager
- is X suitable for Pi

4. Adding overlay
- This is more programming that I have not attempted before
- Let's say I want to add the time in the bottom right corner of the video window

5. Flash playback
- I have seen gstreamer do something like this but dose not fully support FLEX
- Any one managed to get flash running on Pi, perhaps native player from Adobe ?

6. One box - for the Pi, PSU, and specialized hardware
- Some displays require a special interface usualy in form of a PCI card
- The card only interfaces with PCI slot for power, the rest is handled by DVI/HDMI/RS232/USB
- Short of building it on my own, dose any one know a box that can hold PCI card Pi, and PSU

Notes:
- Any challenges to my goal, platform(Pi), way of going about, are more than welcomed
- I have no illusion that this will be easy, but I have high hopes of being possible
- Any information, big, small, a link to an obscure patch, full on how to, absolutely any information is welcomed
- I know that vaapi is intel specific, I have no hopes of getting that on Pi
- I am not a native english speaker so please excuse any mistake
- Any one interested in using this project please contact me
- If interested in technical details, display interfaces, reverse engineering RS232 or USB let me know


Thank you in advance for your answers.

[dom]

Wine is impossible. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29 - it requires an x86 processor.
Flash is impossible. Many thread on this. Adobe has dropped support for flash on ARMs.

Otherwise:
1. omxplayer
2. Will need rewrite
3. Doesn't sound like X is required. It can be used.
4. Straightforward. See /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_font demo app for example.
5. No.
6. You may be able to power pi from a USB socket on display (although that depends on the current it provides).

You could probably also do this with xbmc. It supports add-ons written in python which can launch video and display overlay informations.

[KenT]

Try my pi presents or screenly ose. There are also couple more pi based digital signage solutions if you google