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So I have a network drive that I can access using mounting points pretty easily. There is numerous movies and TV series on it that I want to play from my raspberry pi 2.

I do have VLC installed, can click on movies but they don't work, it simply stalls at 0 seconds and pretty much crashes.

As of now I have to copy path of the movie I want to play and go in console to type omxplayer -b "copy path goes here". I am fine with this but my family wants to access stuff more intuitively, I do feel it could be done better too.

Any input welcome !

EDIT: I'm using raspbian

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  • What does "pretty much crashes" mean? What kind of error do you get?
    – Bex
    Mar 27, 2015 at 9:23
  • It opens then nothing happens, sometimes you'll get audio but most of the time nothing happens. If you try shutting it down it won't unless you go in the task manager and kill it.
    – A_V
    Mar 27, 2015 at 13:41
  • What does the log say?
    – Bex
    Mar 27, 2015 at 13:54
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    Plex would be great but it doesn't work on the Pi, the next best thing is XBMC which will do exactly what you need. (using omx in the background, since they develop it for native GPU rendering)
    – Piotr Kula
    Apr 24, 2015 at 18:59

3 Answers 3

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if your family wants to use it more intuitively, I would suggest you to setup an OpenELEC image. I have my movies and shows on my NAS mounted as samba share. If you want OpenELEC downloads some nice images and summaries for your content and your family can browse through your movies by using the arrow keys of your keyboard or even by using some smartphone app.

If you want to have the benefit of using your Raspberry Pi for other things than consuming media files, I would suggest to create an image of OpenELEC on a seperate SD card and switch SD cards when you want to watch movies. It boots up in just a few seconds.

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  1. If you want to stream audio/video via LAN/WAN to another device/client (Recommended) :

To get an idea of how it works you can see my website in my profile.

  1. If you want to play videos from the RPI2 then consider OpenELEC/ Kodi OS for Raspberry Pi.

  2. If you want to use your Pi for other things and want to use a GUI for omxplayer on Raspbian OS, you can use TBOPlayer (Github link) which is a "A GUI interface using jbaiter's pyomxplayer wrapper to control omxplayer".

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Supposedly it can be done like this:

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/howto-launch-omxplayer-via-gui.html

Though I haven't verified this myself.

There is also a discussion about it here (starts a few posts in with a link to that first site):

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=13328

I hope that one of these helps you.

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  • I don't really like omxplayer as it lacks an user interface...
    – A_V
    Mar 25, 2015 at 13:44
  • Fair enough. Just be aware that omxplayer is apparently the only media player optimised to run on the Pi architecture, so other players may not run well.
    – Ben Allen
    Mar 26, 2015 at 13:03

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