Using flask to play videos

Question

Currently, I have my pi hooked to the TV and I use it to play movies via ssh. While I love simplicity of tmux and ssh, people around me are not quite excited about it :)

My plan is to have a web-interface running on the pi and hopefully control it from the browser. So I ended up writing a really simple flask app that returns a list of movies and I can play them by launching omxplayer via flask using the sub-process module. Its not terrific or anything, but it works.

The problem though is sending commands to the player! It might be possible by talking to the omxplayer process, but I am not sure how.

Any ideas? I know that I can just use xmbc but wheres the fun in that :)

Answer 1

In theory, this approach should work.

Try writing to /proc/[PID of process]/fd/0

A process' fd directory handles the file descriptors the process is concerned about. File descriptor 0 is STDIN. 1 is STDOUT and 2 is STDERR.

Answer 2

There's a library for that, although from the looks of things it may have a few 'quirks':

https://github.com/willprice/python-omxplayer-wrapper

Hello world example

from omxplayer import OMXPlayer
from time import sleep

# This will start an `omxplayer` process, this might 
# fail the first time you run it, currently in the 
# process of fixing this though.
player = OMXPlayer('path/to/file.mp4')

# The player will initially be paused

player.play()
sleep(5)
player.pause()

# Kill the `omxplayer` process gracefully.
player.quit()