Send GPIO trigger(s) at specific video timecode(s)?

Question

Just starting out in the wonderful world of RPi maker projects, scored a Model 2b v.1.1, installed the latest Raspbian and now ready for my first project :-)

What I want to build is a video player for an event which sends out GPIO triggers at specific time codes of the video (only 1 video is being used at this moment), i.e. at 00:32:12 in the video, trigger GPIO x which in turn switches off a light.

Hardware-wise, I think I'm all set, I have:

• A working Pi 2b 1.1
• a breadboard
• a double relay module
• wires etc.

Now all(?) I need is a way to sync the video time code to trigger the right GPIO. I've read a bit about omxplayer-wrapper and I'm aware of OSC, but perhaps my goal can be achieved much simpler since I don't need any external syncing.

Edit - So apparently, python-omxplayer-wrapper is the way to go, thanks to @jsotola for pointing me in the right direction. Actually, just launching the player and a GPIO script simultaneously with the right amount of sleep time works on a basic level. But since this approach provides no 'real' syncing, as soon as any delay is introduced for whatever reason, the timing goes bad. Hence the python-omxplayer-wrapper route.

After a lot of tinkering, I've got python-omxplayer-wrapper installed and working. I also got the GPIO part working (will provide more detail on both when I've got everything working), so all that's left is combining the two to trigger the GPIO's a the right time code.

That's where I got stranded in the provided example code:

from omxplayer import OMXPlayer
from time import sleep
from pathlib import Path

#/* Setup the player as shown in omxplayer-wrapper examples : */
path = Path('Videos/myvideo.m4v')
player = OMXPlayer(path, args=['--no-osd', '--blank'])
player.pause()
sleep(5)
player.play()

#/* Make a query to position() inside infinite loop : */
while (1):
    position = player.position() * 1000
#    /* Event timecodes values are stored in "events" */
    for event in events.values():
        if position - 20 <= event['tc'] and position + 20 >= event['tc']:
#            /* Put your code here */
            print("This is where the first GPIO should be triggered")
player.quit()

When I run this, the video plays fine, but then I get this message in the terminal:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./bm_test.py", line 21, in <module>
    for event in events.values():
NameError: name 'events' is not defined

Unfortunately, I don't have enough reputation yet to respond to the author of the script (source: Simon's answer at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45532783/fire-events-at-specific-timestamps-during-video-playback/), but apparently I need to do something with events. Now I'm not sure if this requires extra packages, such as https://pypi.org/project/Events/ and perhaps https://pypi.org/project/timecode/ , or it's just a matter of adding some extra code.

Being a complete beginner with Python, I need some help here :-)

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I'm just a beginner in Python, but the following works for me:

from omxplayer import OMXPlayer
from time import sleep
from pathlib import Path

# Setup the player as shown in omxplayer-wrapper examples :
path = Path('./recordingsign.mp4')

# the on and off times in seconds
on_target = 5
off_target = 10

player = OMXPlayer(path, args=['--no-osd', '--blank'])
player.pause()
sleep(5)
player.play()

# Make a query to position() inside infinite loop 
while (1):
    try:
        position = int(player.position())
    except:
        # You will get an OMXPlayerDeadError eventually
        break
    if position >= on_target and position <= off_target:
        # Put your code here */
        print("This is where the first GPIO should be triggered")
    # Check position again in one second. 
    # sleep works, but you might want to find an alternative
    sleep(1)

player.quit()

I'm not sure if the person in the first link above ever successfully ran their code in Python; I think /* is used in the C programming language, not Python.

They did, however, helpfully provide the link the the omxplayer-wrapper's git page. If you go there and open the player.py file, you can see the various functions the library provides. Be careful not to use any functions prefixed with _ , as they are private and are only to be used within player.py.