RPI Video Receiver

Raspberry Pi Video Receiver

Todo: The directions below are for Alpine 3.18.3, do they work on 3.20.3? The chief concern is the rpi-video-decoder.tar.gz file

One of the benefits of using Alpine Linux is that the SD/MMC is always mounted read-only. It will not wear out, and it's safe to power-off the device any time. Additionally the boot process has been given a professional look so that only the splash screen is displayed.

The boot time is about 60 seconds. It should speed up ~10 seconds after https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64766 is fixed.

Quick demo:

• Format SD/MMC with one primary partition, FAT32 file system
• Extract https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.18/releases/armhf/alpine-rpi-3.18.3-armhf.tar.gz to the SD/MMC card
• Extract https://dev.alpinelinux.org/~tteras/rpi-video-decoder.tar.gz on top of that

The overlay image contains the following changes:

• fbsplash.ppm provide the splash screen with the Alpine logo
• cmdline.txt has "blacklist=fbcon" appended to disable video console
• a default overlay is provided to play BBC world news
• root password is set to 'rpi'

To build the configuration overlay:

 apk add openssh chrony omxplayer
 vi /etc/network/interfaces        # eth0 configured for dhcp
 vi /etc/conf.d/omxplayer          # to configure TV-channel URL
 rc-update add networking
 rc-update add chronyd
 rc-update add sshd
 rc-update add omxplayer
 rc
 rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*            # so you get new ssh key on boot
 lbu commit