README.md
Video Display

This is an advanced example of streaming uncompressed video over UDP to the block. It consists of a client program running on a computer that sends the video and a server program running on the block that displays the video on its screen.

Running this Blockware

This Blockware has two components -- a UDP server running on the block, and a UDP sender running on your computer (on the same network). You'll need to install ffmpeg (brew install ffmpeg on macOS using Homebrew) to convert videos to the proper format for the block. You'll also need a video file handy to send to the block.

Running the Server (on the block)

Build and upload the code for the Blockware as detailed in the <![CDATA[]]>Blockware README.md<![CDATA[]]>. Make sure to create a src/secrets.h based on the src/secrets.h.example and edit to include your WiFi credentials.

After programming your block should connect to your WiFi then show an IP address on the screen. Take note of the IP for the next step.

Running the client (on your computer)

Compile the client by running

make client/client


Then you can use ffmpeg to convert a video file into the block-friendly 565 pixel format and send it using the client to the IP of your block. Replace 10.0.0.150 with the IP of your block and /path/to/input/video.mp4 with the path to your video file.

ffmpeg -i /path/to/input/video.mp4 -vf "scale=128:128:forceoriginalaspectratio=decrease,pad=128:128:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2" -f rawvideo -pixfmt rgb565 - | ./client/client 10.0.0.150


You should now see your video on your block! You can also probably stream your webcam with something like this (this is for macOS, but you can probably do something similar with ffmpeg's video4linux support on Linux).

ffmpeg -f avfoundation -framerate 10 -videodeviceindex 0 -i ":0" -vf "scale=128:128:forceoriginalaspectratio=decrease,pad=128:128:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2" -f rawvideo -pixfmt rgb565 - | ./client/client 10.0.0.150


If you happen to have multiple blocks for some reason you can send video to multiple blocks at once using tee:

ffmpeg -i /path/to/input/video.mp4 -vf -vf "scale=128:128:forceoriginalaspectratio=decrease,pad=128:128:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2" -f rawvideo -pixfmt rgb565 - | tee >(./client/client 10.0.0.150) >(./client/client 10.0.0.138)