Unable to Display Videos

Hi all,

I’m having trouble displaying videos on my screen. PNG images work just fine but whenever it tries to move to a video the screen goes black and then it skips to the next asset.

I am running Screenly OSE via Balena-Cloud on a RaspPi 3b+ and when looking at the logs, it displays the following whenever it tries to show the video:
05.02.20 14:33:43 (+1100) Showing asset test.avi (video)
05.02.20 14:33:43 (+1100) current url is file:///tmp/screenly_html/black_page.html
05.02.20 14:33:44 (+1100) Resource URI is not correct, remote host is not responding or request was rejected.

I have tried AVI / MP4 / MOV versions all giving the same above error.

I have also tried referencing a public URL, in this example a Youtube video with the same error:
05.02.20 15:19:10 (+1100) Showing asset What's New with Microsoft 365 | August 2019 (video)
05.02.20 15:19:10 (+1100) current url is file:///tmp/screenly_html/black_page.html
05.02.20 15:19:11 (+1100) Resource URI is not correct, remote host is not responding or request was rejected.

Anyone got any thoughts or ideas?

Hi Jason!

Found this potential solution on Screenly OSE’s GitHub (https://github.com/Screenly/screenly-ose/issues/1193):

"I had the same issue where my Screenly set up on Rpi with Balena Cloud would not play any of the H264 or normal videos.

This is what I tried to fix it:

I had the same issue where my Screenly set up on Rpi with Balena Cloud would not play any of the H264 or normal videos.

This is what I tried to fix it:

Adjust the GPU memory of your Raspberry Pi in order to optimize content playback.
To do this, click the “Fleet Configuration” tab on the left-side menu on the balenaCloud interface. On the Fleet Configuration menu, scroll down to find the RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_gpu_mem configuration item. Then, click “activate” to enable the item. Next, click the pencil icon on the right-hand side and change the value to 192. Restart the Pi to make this config work.
Hope that is helpful!"

Let me know if it works.

2 Likes

Hey Matvei,

Thank you for your response - Yes you’re right, I hadn’t set the GPU MEM high enough. Updating this has now allowed the videos to play successfully.

As an FYI for anyone else coming across this, I did also run into the same issue when playing with BalenaSense trying to display a webpage - I needed to up the GPU MEM in order for them to display.

1 Like