My Raspberry Pi media player suite has reached a generally usable level. At the bottom of the stack there is omxplayer, then the omxd playlist daemon, the rpi.fm command-line internet radio player and, finally, RemotePi the remote control web-app, optimized for smart-phone screens.

Check out its home page.

Why Not XBMC?

I admit I suffer from severe NIH (Not Invented Here) symptoms. But this time, I actually tried to install XBMC from Michael Gorven’s Debian package. But what do I see?

I need to get 44 MB of archives. 120 MB additional disk space will be used. RemotePi, rpi.fm and omxd are 3 MB including all sources, all binaries and all git repositories.

And lo and behold, who are among the dependencies?

• qt3
• mysql-common
• samba-common-bin

Come on! I never use my Raspberry’s GUI. All the GUI RemotePi has is a web-app.

MySQL? Probably a sign of a nice tag-based media library which, in real life, is an absolute pain in the neck to use. You have a DJ-set album, from all sorts of different artists, and a tag-based player just refuses to play it in the order intended by the DJ. I’ll stick to my files and directories, thank you very much.

Samba? I’m one of those smug Penguinistas whose home is Windows-free. So no thanks.

My Raspberry Pi media player suite.

RemotePi

Browse music/videos, internet radio stations and even YouTube on your Raspberry Pi and play them on your audio system or non-smart HDMI TV.

Control everything from your smartphone via the RemotePi web-app. You don’t need an extra remote control, you don’t need SSH, you don’t need to connect physically to the Raspberry Pi, and you definitely don’t need to start the GUI.

Features

RemotePi uses the omxd/omxplayer backend.

Show what omxd is playing now, including album art or YouTube thumbnail and actual/overall clip time.

Limit file browsing within the Raspberry Pi’s file system to a root directory specified in a config file /etc/remotepi.cfg.

Insert, add and append files, directories or internet radio streams to the omxd playlist.

You can even interrupt the playlist to play a single file or a YouTube clip. The playlist resumes after the end of the movie.

Control buttons: Play/pause/stop playback, or navigate in the playlist with repeat, previous/next, Rewind/FastForward 30/600s, or previous or next album buttons.

Delete actual track or entire playlist.

Cycle through subtitles and soundtracks, switch audio output to HDMI of Jack.

RemotePi is strictly file and directory based and could not care less for MP3 tags in files. It does not use 3rd party databases for metadata, except for internet radio. Best used with a nicely arranged folder structure.

Installation

Source code and installation instructions on Github.

Tecnology

RemotePi is a single HTML5 webpage, you load it once and then it communicates with the Raspberry Pi with AJAX calls using JavaScript. It won’t work it JavaScript is disabled.

youtube-dl

From rg3, RemotePi uses this program to extract direct stream links from YouTube page URLs. You can install it from Raspbian, as well.

rpi.fm

Who does not love internet radio stations? Who does not like to listen to Liquid Funk or Detroit Techno or Verdi all day long? Now you can do it easily on your Raspberry Pi. rpi.fm is an interactive command line tool that allows you to browse hundreds of genres and thousands of stations from the database of internet-radio.com.

Check out the details on Github.

rpi.fm also uses the omxd media player daemon for playback.

omxd

But what the hell is omxd, you may ask. Well, you probably know the brilliant omxplayer that plays full HD videos using the GPU of the Raspberry Pi. It has a few limitations, though. It can play only one file at a time, unless you are a scary shell-wizard.

Would not it be great, if you could add your entire music collection to its playlist in one step?

Would not it be great if you could log out of your SSH/GUI session and it would keep cranking out Psytekk?

Would not it be great to interrupt your music playlist, watch a movie, and continue your playlist where you left off, after Vincent Vega and Jules leave the restaurant?

Exactly. That’s what omxd, the omxplayer daemon does. Maintain, manipulate a playlist, and play it in the background. It’s the heart and soul of RemotePi and rpi.fm.

Check it out on Github.

Future Features

Debian packages for all three tools. So all you have to do for installation is:

sudo apt-get install remotepi

The Raspberry Pi kicks ass as a media player. Thanks to, among others, rpi.fm, my and my friends’ favourite internet radio player.

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Upon popular user request, I hereby present its new “My Stations” function. rpi.fm now remembers whenever you choose a station. It builds a list from them, ranked by how often you’ve chosen each, and offers a new command “m” to access them.

Enjoy. But only after you’ve updated rpi.fm form Github.

For those in the know:

cd rpi.fm
git pull origin master
sudo make install
rpi.fm

For rpi.fm Noobs:

git clone https://github.com/subogero/rpi.fm
cd rpi.fm
sudo make install
rpi.fm

I’ve mentioned already that the Raspberry has become a rather integral part of my flat. And now I mention that I’m a great consumer of ska, reggae, soul, house, samba, sambass, funk and liquid funk.

And that’s where internet radios come into the picture. But it’s been so awkward so far. Hook up the phone to the stereo’s AUX cable? Start an entire desktop session on a laptop to play them in a browser and hook it up to the stereo’s AUX cable?

But now the Raspberry is in place, and it’s permanently connected to both the TV and the stereo. So I had to find a way to play internet radio stations from the command line. The internet did not reveal definitive answers, so I wrote a little Perl program.

It does some data-mining on www.internet-radio.com and presents an extremely simple interactive command line interface to choose genres and stations, start playback on the audio-jack or on HDMI, to play or pause, to quit or quit but continue playback in the background.

It’s very easy to use. I ssh sometimes into the Raspberry to change the station, and then it plays LiquidBass.net or something else all day long.

It’s called rpi.fm. Please find it on GitHub.

I tested it on Raspbian Wheezy. It uses omxplayer for playback. Important: the user must be in the “audio” group. The default user “pi” is, for new users edit /etc/group as root:

audio:x:29:pulse,pi,youruser

Next project: web-app for the same thing. And then the phone can be used as a remote control.