HAL Media Player
Free and open source media player for Raspberry Pi
HAL Media Player is made to run on Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, fully networked controlled, giving a turnkey solution to cover all capacities of a basic media player
Features
Playback
Network controllable transport functions, audio level, audio/vidéo sync
File upload
Upload through web interface or copy from USB stick. Media file is read from system SD card.
Network
Ethernet and/or wifi network fully configurable
Outputs
Audio output through jack, HDMI, USB sound card or Hifiberry DAC.
Video output through HDMI or Analog
Installation
Flash the disk image onto an SD Card with tools like Balena Etcher or Raspberry Pi Imager.
The player boots with wifi disabled, Ethernet set as DHCP, and hostname raspberrypi.
To access the web interface, plug an ethernet cable between your computer and the raspberry pi, set you computer as DHCP client, wait to get a link-local IP address (169.254.xxx.xxx), then type raspberrypi.local in a web browser. You will find documentation in the "About" section of the web interface.
For power users
The web interface lets your edit /boot/config.txt without having to access the Pi with SSH. The config.txt files allows setting parameters such as video overscan, output resolution override, Hifiberry DAC configuration. Please refer to this page pour la for documentation.
If you still need to access the Pi in SSH, login is pi password raspberry.
Read-only file system
Once you are done configuring your player, you can make the system read-only with a control in the web interface. This will allow you to turn on and off the Pi simply by turning on/off the power supply, with no risk of corrupting the SD card.
Media formats
The Raspberry Pi 3 cand read 1080p videos encoded in H264. To get video codec settings well adjusted to the Raspberry Pi's capacities, we provide this preset for the free and open source Handbrake video encoding software. We recommend starting from high quality media files (for example Prores) and transcode them with Handbrake.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is also capable of reading 4K videos encoded in H265.
The player can also read audio files without video.
Compatibility
HAL Media Player is compatible with Raspberrys Pis 3 (3B, 3B+) and Raspberry Pis 4.
It is not compatible with Raspberry Pis 1 et 2, nor with Raspberry Pis 5.
The OS is Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye, media playback engine is VLC.
Control protocols
The player can also be controlled with HTTP requests (refer to the ones used in the web interface), or with OSC (OSC dictionary is available in the web interface).
Contribute
HAL Media Player is an open source project. join us on Github !
Looking for alternative projects without network control ? Check out mp4museum or videolooper.de