How to play video on Raspberry Pi?

Date September 22, 2017 Author Catherine Category HD

As a series of small single-board computers, the Raspberry Pi is a great platform for building a video playback appliance since it’s inexpensive, tiny, and has support for hardware video acceleration. Playing video on Raspberry Pi is the common thing, Raspberry Pi can support the HD and full HD TV video. When you get one Raspberry Pi, first thing and easy thing is to play video on Raspberry Pi, for some Raspberry Pi beginner, we have collected 2 ways to tell you to play video on Raspberry Pi, hope you can learn this skills.

Solution 1: Play Video on Raspberry Pi With omxplayer

Playing videos on Raspberry Pi is easy to do, you need one media player, here, we take the omxplayer for example, which enables sounds output on the HDMI port. With this player, you don’t even need to enter the GUI (StartX) to play the videos! really awesome stuff. When you play the video on Raspberry Pi, you just need to type in the command in the terminal:

omxplayer -o hdmi /path/to/filename.mp4

you can update and check the Raspberry Pi version by this command:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade -y omxplayer

Solution 2: Play Video on Raspberry Pi With XBMC

What’s more, you can install XBMC instead which is a great Media center software for playing videos. XBMC works on the Raspberry Pi well. It also allows a lots of fun add-ons to enrich your media center experience. This post will show you how to install XBMC on Raspberry Pi for playing videos on Raspberry Pi.

1. First of all fire up terminal:

wget http://svn.stmlabs.com/svn/raspbmc/release/installers/python/install.py  chmod +x install.py

2. Now run the installation script with sudo privileges.

sudo python install.py

3. Then you will be greeted with a screen similar to the one below. You are now using the installer. Simply follow the instructions and you should be fine.

Best Way: Play Any Video on Raspberry Pi Smoothly

There are some video are not supported by the Raspberry Pi, like the HEVC/H.265, Raspberry Pi 3 does not have H.265 decoding hardware, you have to use other tool which can convert the H.265 video or other video to Raspberry Pi supported video formats. I recommend you Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate for Windows which can convert any video to Raspberry Pi supported video formats. With the user-friendly interface, you can master this software in 3 minutes.

Best of all, you even can import the DVD and Blu-ray disc to this software and get the digital video formats for Raspberry Pi, like the MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, etc. This software can remove the most DVD and Blu-ray protection, like the CSS, UOPs, DVD and Blu-ray region code. In addition, you also can enjoy the 3D video on PC with 3D glasses. More information, you can read this video converter review.

Quick Guide: Convert Video to Raspberry Pi supported video formats

1. Open this software and click File to add the video, you also can drag the video to this software directly. 
2. Click Format and choose one video format you need from the 300+ video formats.
3. Click Setting and adjust the video parameters: video codec, audio codec, video frame, video bitrate, audio channels, etc. (Optional)
4. Go back to the main interface and click Convert button to start the video conversion. 

When you get the output video, you can use the USB to play videos on Raspberry Pi. For these users who are not familiar with command, use this video converter is the option which is easy to use. Hopw this post helpful for you.