Ghost Overlay / OMXPlayerTransparency

bhepler · Oct 23, 2017, 3:13 AM

I played around with this a bit. In the end, running omxplayer with a resized and rotated video was the way to go. Oh, and I re-edited a few videos together in order to provide a more seamless experience. I’ll see about capturing some video tomorrow and uploading it.

I used pm2 to manage a quick script to keep the video going in case of failure. Overall, I’m quite pleased. Now to do the same to my office mirror…

Reotch2 · Oct 23, 2017, 3:39 AM

@bhepler Are you running a borderless OMX window centered on your mirror? If so, what parameters you starting it with?

After all of my troubleshooting, it seems like OMX is the best solution. I’ve just been putting up with the loss of module brightness. Overall though, good enough to get me through Halloween.

bhepler · Oct 23, 2017, 1:29 PM

@Reotch2 I started by editing together the videos into a single 5 minute video, using the vertical sources. These show up on my normal computer monitor as rotated 90 degrees. Once i had the video edited (with several of the buffer video interspersed to add some tension), I output the video as a full resolution 1920x1080 MP4. I copied that video over to the pi and then used ffdshow to rotate the video 90 degrees. This part took close to 30 minutes and it made the pi sweat resistors.

Once the file was rotated, I created a one-line script file called boo.sh that contains omxplayer -p -o hdmi --loop --alpha 85 boo.mp4. Start it up with pm2 (pm2 start boo.sh) and then save it.

Originally I was going to convert the file to webm, but the ffdshow that installed on the pi doesn’t have that switch enabled. I didn’t feel like recompiling ffdshow, so I just went with a H264 encoded MP4.

Reotch2 · Oct 23, 2017, 1:29 PM

@bhepler Wow. Well done. That’s exactly where I ended up except my pm2 file name is called “omx.sh”. I ran into issues with the looped video interrupting my Monitors sleep mode (PIR Sensor), so I ended up disabling it and setting a crontab for both sleep and pm2 stop/start omx.sh. My original post was only because the —alpha was dimming other modules. Are you seeing the same?

Good work.

bhepler · Oct 24, 2017, 11:29 AM

Video of the ghost in the mirror can be found here: https://youtu.be/6hb1N1tYcPc

As an aside, this morning I changed the command to omxplayer -p -o local --loop --alpha 85 boo.mp4 to cut the sound from the video file. It woke me up when the mirror switched on this morning at 5 AM.

Gubert · Jun 14, 2018, 10:10 AM

@bhepler said in Ghost Overlay / OMXPlayerTransparency:

Video of the ghost in the mirror can be found here: https://youtu.be/6hb1N1tYcPc

As an aside, this morning I changed the command to omxplayer -p -o local --loop --alpha 85 boo.mp4 to cut the sound from the video file. It woke me up when the mirror switched on this morning at 5 AM.

Realy nice solution! Looks awesome!
Could you sum up all the things needed for that?
Reading through this 4 Pages is very difficulty.
Would be very thankful.