QLC+ on RPi: use case and a few questions
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2017 1:29 pm
I’ve been helping a friend of mine to implement a fixed DMX+video installation with the help of a raspberry pi 3 and QLC+. The installation is an “escape game” where several people are locked in a room equipped with lights, sensors and two independent screens, the people have one hour to solve the different enigmas in the room to escape. QLC+ on the Rpi handles all of the two screens, DMX, scenes, sounds and can be remotely controlled by an iPad, via the web-interface.
In the beginning of the project we were considering using RPi only for video playback, but as the project evolved we found that, a single RPi board could handle all that stuff... Even if we’re pushing the Pi and QLC+ a little to their limits all is performing quite well for this critical use!
Yet we have a few questions for the community:
1) We saw that a new version of QLC+ has been released. Is this version available on the RPi platform? If yes, how to upgrade?
2) We’re using scripts to launch/stop videos and sounds. The scripts in QLC call bash scripts to play videos
#!/bin/bash
omxplayer.1 --no-osd --aspect-mode fill --loop --vol ${2:--0} -o both --display=5 $1
or to stop them
#!/bin/bash
killall play_hdmi
killall omxplayer.1
killall omxplayer.bin.1
(the omxplayer binaries have been duplicated to use the killall command, the simplest option we found)
Sometimes the script subsystem in QLC+ seems not to respond, i.e. no more video will display (the DMX show continues), forcing the operator to reboot the RPi… This problem seems to happen in a completely random manner.. Do anybody has an idea what could go wrong and/or how to debug?
3) We followed the instructions to use omxplayer, as given on the forum.
viewtopic.php?t=9021
We cannot get rid of the console tho, since following the instructions in section 2. give an error message saying that xterm-256color has no blank command. Is there a workaround for this?
In the beginning of the project we were considering using RPi only for video playback, but as the project evolved we found that, a single RPi board could handle all that stuff... Even if we’re pushing the Pi and QLC+ a little to their limits all is performing quite well for this critical use!
Yet we have a few questions for the community:
1) We saw that a new version of QLC+ has been released. Is this version available on the RPi platform? If yes, how to upgrade?
2) We’re using scripts to launch/stop videos and sounds. The scripts in QLC call bash scripts to play videos
#!/bin/bash
omxplayer.1 --no-osd --aspect-mode fill --loop --vol ${2:--0} -o both --display=5 $1
or to stop them
#!/bin/bash
killall play_hdmi
killall omxplayer.1
killall omxplayer.bin.1
(the omxplayer binaries have been duplicated to use the killall command, the simplest option we found)
Sometimes the script subsystem in QLC+ seems not to respond, i.e. no more video will display (the DMX show continues), forcing the operator to reboot the RPi… This problem seems to happen in a completely random manner.. Do anybody has an idea what could go wrong and/or how to debug?
3) We followed the instructions to use omxplayer, as given on the forum.
viewtopic.php?t=9021
We cannot get rid of the console tho, since following the instructions in section 2. give an error message saying that xterm-256color has no blank command. Is there a workaround for this?