How-to: Open-source video looping device

The displays in our upcoming exhibition are completely self-prepared by the researchers, with prints from the copy shop, screens from our office, wood panels from the construction shop. We couldn’t have done it without our student assistants designing and preparing the posters and signs. And we had to improvise a lot. For example for exhibiting video works.

I am happy to have learned how to make a simple video loop device that boots when connected to power and plays video(s) from an USB stick, and wanted to share the process:

Hardware is a Raspberry Pi 4 B (which is 50-70 € online). Then we put the https://videolooper.de/ image on the SD card with Raspberry Pi imager. For some reason I had to use the older version 2.3 of videolooper, the other wouldn’t boot, got a “firmware not found” error. And to make the old version usable with the Pi 4 B, I had to replace two files (start4.elf and fixup4.dat) in the written image with those from the current firmware: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot

One of the videos we had played directly, the other I had to convert with Handbrake to h.264 mp4 with 1080p (this was specified as the necessary video format on the videolooper website).

First the sound quality on the audio jack was very bad, but following the instructions on the website under “analogue sound” solved that completely.