Screenly Forum

Unable to Display Videos

#1

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?

#2

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.

1 Like
#3

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.