How to disable local terminal showing through when playing video

Question

Any local terminal text (login prompt, etc) is showing through areas of the screen that are not covered by video (i.e. the black bars on the top and bottom) when I use a remote terminal to play video with omxplayer. If I wait 10-15 minutes, the local terminal goes totally black due to inactivity which fixes the problem, but that's kind of a lame workaround.

I'm thinking that using omxplayer locally would sidestep the problem, but I cant verify since my RPi hates all of my keyboards. I also dont want to play video that way long-term.

How can I black out the local terminal so it doesn't show through when using a remote terminal to play videos over HDMI?

Answer 1

sudo sh -c "TERM=linux setterm -foreground black >/dev/tty0"
sudo sh -c "TERM=linux setterm -clear >/dev/tty0"

This will change the font color to black, than clears the screen.

Or in a single line:

sudo sh -c "TERM=linux setterm -foreground black -clear >/dev/tty0"

And set it back to normal:

sudo sh -c "TERM=linux setterm -foreground white -clear >/dev/tty0"

Answer 2

Here is what I do (in a script):

setterm -cursor off;
clear;
omxplayer -o hdmi "video file.mkv" | echo "";
setterm -cursor on;

If you do use a script to call omxplayer, you might want to add

complete -F _longopt watch

to your .bashrc (or similar for whatever terminal you use) so you get filename tab-completion.