I'm having a problem building a kiosk display system using Python, Tkinter and VLC. In my setup, everything is latest version(only got the Pi 2 weeks ago).
-RPI 5 with latest Bookworm 64 bit.
-Python-VLC
-simple Tkinter GUI with a canvas for VLC to play on.
-Users select a combination of videos and images to play using push buttons.
-I add them to a list and play them consecutively using python-vlc calls(one at a time)
-basically I use root.after() to cycle thru each video with duration determined by video length.
-Images are displayed on canvas using Pillow (with video play stopped).
My problem is:
-VLC will play these videos+images for around 10 mins before the screen freezes.
-the odd thing is if I shift the window slightly, it starts playing again.
-but if I constantly stop/start play, VLC will hang up forever.
-is this a sign that something is messing up the Tkinter mainloop? But I read that VLC runs in its own thread.
-I don't think the default Window manager(Wayland/labwc) has a screensaver timer on RPi 5.
I have tried other packages like vlcrc and experience other issues. The VLC rc process tends to crash with segmentation fault. It also crashes if you add files too quickly to VLC. Sometimes the goto, next and prev commands fail to take effect.
Have other users experienced such unstable behaviour from VLC on RPi 5? I've tried installing Tkintervideo but had many dependencies errors. It seems the author has stopped work on it now. Is there another way of controlling mp4 videos on RPi 5 that users have successfully used for their projects? Many kiosk projects on the web use Chromium browser and I'm wondering if that's a better approach but I need to interface to pushbuttons.
Thanks for any suggestions, many cheers.![:)]( "Smile")
-RPI 5 with latest Bookworm 64 bit.
-Python-VLC
-simple Tkinter GUI with a canvas for VLC to play on.
-Users select a combination of videos and images to play using push buttons.
-I add them to a list and play them consecutively using python-vlc calls(one at a time)
-basically I use root.after() to cycle thru each video with duration determined by video length.
-Images are displayed on canvas using Pillow (with video play stopped).
My problem is:
-VLC will play these videos+images for around 10 mins before the screen freezes.
-the odd thing is if I shift the window slightly, it starts playing again.
-but if I constantly stop/start play, VLC will hang up forever.
-is this a sign that something is messing up the Tkinter mainloop? But I read that VLC runs in its own thread.
-I don't think the default Window manager(Wayland/labwc) has a screensaver timer on RPi 5.
I have tried other packages like vlcrc and experience other issues. The VLC rc process tends to crash with segmentation fault. It also crashes if you add files too quickly to VLC. Sometimes the goto, next and prev commands fail to take effect.
Have other users experienced such unstable behaviour from VLC on RPi 5? I've tried installing Tkintervideo but had many dependencies errors. It seems the author has stopped work on it now. Is there another way of controlling mp4 videos on RPi 5 that users have successfully used for their projects? Many kiosk projects on the web use Chromium browser and I'm wondering if that's a better approach but I need to interface to pushbuttons.
Thanks for any suggestions, many cheers.
Statistics: Posted by alw1746 — Mon Jun 09, 2025 12:08 pm