BASH playlist management for your Raspberry Pi

Introduction

I just recently got a Raspberry Pi, which is a decent piece of hardware, but the fact that it can't really do video playback using any other player than omxplayer left me annoyed. Omxplayer isn't a very nice player, most annoyingly it's missing playlist functionality.

To make the Raspberry Pi a bit more useful for me, I decided to make my own playlist manager around omxplayer, and this is it.

What to do

Set up a local bin folder (optional but recommended)

Why would you want to do this? Because you shouldn't be modifying the system folders with your own scripts etc. .. if you feel otherwise, feel free to modify your system any way you want.

Run the following commands on your BASH terminal to create a ~/bin and add it to your path:

# Create the local bin folder
mkdir "${HOME}/bin"

# Set decent permissions on it
chmod 0700 "${HOME}/bin"

# Add it to your PATH in future sessions
echo -e '\nPATH="${PATH}:${HOME}/bin"' >> "${HOME}/.bashrc"

# And enable it in the current one
export PATH="${PATH}:${HOME}/bin"

If you have other terminal sessions open and want to activate the local bin on them, just run the last line from that on them..

Create the scripts

Create the following two scripts in your local bin, or system bin folder if you didn't create a local bin..

process_playlist

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# Plays videos from playlist
#
# Copyright © 2013 Janne Enberg http://lietu.net/
# This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
# terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, Version 2,
# as published by Sam Hocevar. See http://www.wtfpl.net/ for more details.
#

# If you want to switch omxplayer to something else, or add parameters, use these
PLAYER="omxplayer"
PLAYER_OPTIONS=""

# Where is the playlist
PLAYLIST_FILE="${HOME}/.playlist"

# Process playlist contents
while [ true ]; do
        # Sleep a bit so it's possible to kill this
        sleep 1

        # Do nothing if the playlist doesn't exist
        if [ ! -f "${PLAYLIST_FILE}" ]; then
                echo "Playlist file ${PLAYLIST_FILE} not found"
                continue
        fi

        # Get the top of the playlist
        file=$(cat "${PLAYLIST_FILE}" | head -n1)

        # And strip it off the playlist file
        cat "${PLAYLIST_FILE}" | tail -n+2 > "${PLAYLIST_FILE}.new"
        mv "${PLAYLIST_FILE}.new" "${PLAYLIST_FILE}"

        # Skip if this is empty
        if [ -z "${file}" ]; then
                echo "Playlist empty or bumped into an empty entry for some reason"
                continue
        fi

        # Check that the file exists
        if [ ! -f "${file}" ]; then
                echo "Playlist entry ${file} not found"
                continue
        fi

        echo
        echo "Playing ${file} ..."
        echo

        "${PLAYER}" ${PLAYER_OPTIONS} "${file}"

        echo
        echo "Playback complete, continuing to next item on playlist."
        echo
done

playlist

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# Add files to playlist
#
# Copyright © 2013 Janne Enberg http://lietu.net/
# This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
# terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, Version 2,
# as published by Sam Hocevar. See http://www.wtfpl.net/ for more details.
#

# Where is the playlist
PLAYLIST_FILE="${HOME}/.playlist"


# Check for proper usage
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "
Adds files to the system playlist (${PLAYLIST_FILE})

Usage:
  playlist *.avi
  playlist /path/to/futurama/*/*

"

        exit 1
fi

# Loop through arguments given
for entry in "$@"; do
        if [ ! -f "${entry}" ]; then
                echo "Invalid entry, ${entry} .. skipping"
                continue
        fi

        # Get full path to the file
        fullPath=$(readlink -f -- "${entry}")

        # Append file to playlist
        echo "${fullPath}" >> "${PLAYLIST_FILE}"
        echo "Added ${fullPath} to system playlist"
done

It is pretty important that there is nothing in the file before the #!, no new lines, no nothing. Otherwise the formatting doesn't matter much...

Make the scripts executable:

chmod +x "${HOME}/bin/"*

To make the playlist processing script appear in your menus, you can put the following contents in ~/.local/share/applications/process_playlist.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Process system playlist
Exec=process_playlist
Terminal=True
Categories=AudioVideo;Player;
Icon=/usr/share/icons/nuoveXT2/96x96/categories/applications-multimedia.png

Use it

Start process_playlist from a terminal or the menu item.
Find a bunch of media files to add to your playlist, e.g. /path/to/*.avi and to start playing them run: playlist /path/to/*.avi