omxremote

Web interface and API for Raspberry Pi Omxplayer.

Overview

Omxplayer is made specifically for Raspberry Pi (RPi) and is one of the most simpliest video players you can find. Although there are many others, including raspbmc that work as a full-blown media center, omxplayer is a perfect fit for systems that do not have any GUI or peripherals and running stock Rasbpian OS. However, omxplayer was designed to be controlled via keyboard shortcuts and does not provide any way to control it remotely.

Omxremote project is an attempt to build a web frontend and simple API to control video playback on a remote RPi device. Its built in Go, which has capability to cross-compile source code for ARM and as a result provides a single binary with no external dependencies to be downloaded and installed on your Pi.

Screenshot

Requirements

In order to use omxremote you must have omxplayer installed on your RPi. Most recent distributions on Rasbpian should already come with omxplayer preinstalled.

In case if you dont have it installed, use the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y omxplayer

No special permissions are required in order to play videos with omxplayer and omxremote.

Install

Use Github Releases

Or run the following snippet for quick install:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sosedoff/omxremote/master/install.sh | bash

Compile

Compiling this project on RPi is a bit of a difficult task and does not necessarily makes sense since Go provides ability to cross-compile source code for multiple platforms on your local development environment. You can do that by following the steps:

make setup
make release

That will produce a binary that's ready to be transferred and executed on your RPi. In cases if you don't have Make available on your system, you can execute the following commands:

go get
GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=6 go build

Usage

Options:

Usage of omxremote:
  -frontend
      Enable frontend applicaiton (default true)
  -media string
      Path to media files (default "./")
  -v  Print version
  -zeroconf
      Enable service advertisement with Zeroconf (default true)

To start omxremote, run the following command:

omxremote -media /path/to/media

By default server will start on port 8080 and listen on all network interfaces. You can connect to it if you have any device (laptop, phone) on the same wifi network. If you dont know the IP address of your RPi, run ifconfig.

To enable service discovery using Zeroconf, use the flag:

omxremote -media ./ -zeroconf

Omxremote advertises itself as omxremote._tcp

To start the server on a specific interface or a given port, set the HOST and PORT variables.

HOST=192.168.1.100 PORT=8081 omxremote -media ./

Running as daemon

First, make sure you have copied the binary to /usr/bin/:

sudo cp omxremote /usr/bin/

To test if omxremote could be found in $PATH, run:

which omxremote
# => /usr/bin/omxremote

Next step is to create a media directory:

mkdir /home/pi/media

This directory will be used by omxremote to scan for all media files. The following section config files will also use that directory.

init.d

Use the following example to create a new init.d script:

sudo nano /etc/init.d/omxremote
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/omxremote

And then you can start the remote:

sudo /etc/init.d/omxremote start

systemd

Use the following example to create a new unit file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/omxremote.unit
sudo systemctl enable omxremote
sudo service omxremote start

API

Endpoints:

/status - Returns current player status
/browse - Returns files in specified media directory
/play - Start media playback
/command/:name - Execute a command
/host - Get host stats (memory, storage)
/remove - Remove a media file or directory

Available commands:

pause
stop
volume_up
volume_down
subtitles
seek_back
seek_back_fast
seek_forward
seek_forward_fast

Troubleshooting

ERROR: COMXAudio::Decode timeout

If you see this error when playing video files, make sure to give more memory to raspberry pi GPU. On B+ model the default is 16mb. Try setting it to 64/128mb. To edit settings, run: sudo raspi-config.

Raspbian 8

Raspbian 8 does not carry omxplayer binary. You must install the player before using omxremote:

sudo apt-get install -y omxplayer

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Rio6/omxremote