Happy Halloween! I kinda took over the office mirror for a month

bhepler

We’re back in the office after a brief break for a plague. So I got into the mirrors and uploaded some moving portrait videos.

First, the right side:
https://youtu.be/5647bHkcUw0

And on the left side:
https://youtu.be/HT6_DEtfaSc

Alphons

@bhepler looks great. Is it a video file that you played?

bhepler

@Alphons - Yep. The boss bought a package of spooky videos from AtmosphereX. They’re designed to be run on your TV or projected onto your wall or windows as part of your Halloween decorations.

I edited a few of them together into a 3 minute video and set it to play on a loop.

cowboysdude

@bhepler That is really AWESOME!

cyberphox

I have a boatload of those AtmosphereX videos…great for Halloween and Christmas stuff

cowboysdude

@cyberphox even better!!!

RaspiManu

@bhepler very nice work :D

MC

great stuff. looks very good :thumbs_up:

johnnyboy

@bhepler
Really loving that … A lot!

Couple questions…

How did you disable the interface to be able to show this on it’s own? Is it still playing on MM, but with everything else stopped?

Video File?.. where did you store it and what player did you use? What is the name of the first one?

Did the player give the loop option?

Is this very CPU intensive, seeing that you disabled the MM interface?
Thanks 😉

elitecybernet

any sound for that sir ? @bhepler

bhepler

Sorry about the delay! Lots of other projects going on at the Fortress Hepler.

To answer your questions, @johnnyboy :

I created a simple one-line script that plays the video on a loop and then added it to the PM2 management via pm2 start boo.sh and pm2 save. I disabled the Magic Mirror interface via pm2 stop MagicMirror and pm2 save. Now when then mirror boots, PM2 only watches over the script that calls the video playback.
It’s not running the MagicMirror interface. No sense using all that overhead and calls to the weather API when it’s not being displayed.
Caveat: the right display runs a video on loop under normal circumstances. Commenting out the one line that runs that video file and adding a line to play a different video file was trivial.
Yes, VLC has the option to play a playlist or single file on a loop. You can find the command line options at VLC Help
Not really. The file is already on the disk and sized to the resolution of the monitor. There’s no CPU or GPU intensive tasks and the on board hardware acceleration takes care of most of it.

@elitecybernet - Yeah, there is sound included in the video files. I turned it down as it got really distracting really quickly. The video is only like 3 minutes long and hearing the demonic laughter every 3 minutes got old. I think the left portrait was at 50% volume and the right was completely muted.

Now that Halloween is gone, I reverted the left & right displays to their original format. Because PM2 manages the scripts, it took all of 30 seconds per display. The hardest part was remembering their IP address so I could log in.