2017-03-10

OMX Player Integration

Time to check in again. I've been working more on the integration of the OMXPlayer into my car-puter application. I've got both the MP3 player and the Video player apps working.

The Raspberry Pi comes with a really powerful media player called "OMXPlayer". It's powerful, but it's a command-line application so it needs to run from a terminal window or a background shell process.

I've managed to figure out a way to launch the OMXPlayer as a background process and then control it by sending it D-BUS commands. This has worked out pretty well.

The OMXPlayer does a great job of playing audio and video files and it exploits the powerful video hardware included in the Raspberry Pi.

My MP3 player application is now extracting the album artwork, artist name, album name, and song title from the MP3 file and the OMXPlayer is playing the file.

In the demo video below, it appears that my application is playing a video but what is actually happening is the OMXPlayer is launched and its video portal is positioned over a blank area on my application window. It's a total fake-out. But the overall effect is that it appears that my application is playing the video. This is precisely what I wanted.

More videos/pictures etc. to follow as this project moves forward.