Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Using fbi
Find photos you like and resize them from 1920 x 1080 pixels to JPG using about 80
percent image quality for optimal size and quality. The reason you should resize is
so that the Pi can load the data much quicker into the buffer. Using screen sizes from
19 inches to 32 inches will be pretty crisp, but if you are going to use a screen larger
than 32 inches, you should resize them to 2560 x 1600. These are the recommended
HD resolution guidelines for 16:9 aspect ratio screens.
Use the following command lines over SSH. This will install fbi and start a simple
slideshow over SSH, but the output will be the attached monitor on HDMI.
# sudo apt-get install fbi
# cd /home/pi/photos
# sudo fbi -T 1 -a -noverbose -t 5 *.*
Fbi will now loop through all the images in the directory changing them every 5
seconds until you stop it.
The
T -1
command line tells fbi to use the terminal 1 output (in SSH only),
which will be the HDMI port. We tell it to autoresize the images to it the screen,
while
-a
.
-t 5
changes the image every 5 seconds and
-noverbose
disables any
debugging information.
You will notice that fbi will not block the console and runs in the background.
It is possible to run fbi again and it will not complain about another instance.
However, this may cause
Out of memory
errors and unwanted behavior.
To stop fbi, we use the
killall
command.
# sudo killall fbi
Watching movies
We can watch movies using
OMXPlayer
, which was specifically designed by
the XBMC project to use hardware decoding on the Pi. Since OMXPlayer uses
the hardware decoders, it is possible for you to use any additionally purchased
video licenses.
OMXPlayer requires at least 256 MB GPU RAM to run.
