Скачать или смотреть 2025 - Play Video on Boot - Raspberry Pi 2W Zero - VLC & Systemd

Raspberry Pi Zero 2W

I needed to use a Pi to automatically play a video on repeat in full screen when it turned on. I found it surprisingly hard to get right.
I hope this helps.

The script uses a simple Systemd service to call a cvlc command (which is how you use VLC media player from the command line).
The reason I struggled so much is that I couldn't find any documentation on cvlc and I haven't used services much. There are also some tricky aspects to using VLC from the terminal environment, as it doesn't always have access to the necessary environment variables, hence the DISPLAY:=0 line.

I was using ssh to write the code on the Pi as I didn't have a keyboard and mouse.

Code:
Don't forget to change the username, hostname and video name for your use case.

Copy video file across:
$ cd Downloads
$ scp option2.mp4 [email protected]:/home/username

Create service file (autoplay.service):
$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/autoplay.service

Copy this into Service:
[Unit]
Description=Start video at boot
After=network.target
[Service]
User=nike
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 10
ExecStart=cvlc --fullscreen --loop --no-video-title-show /home/nike/video_name.mp4
Restart=always
RestartSec=5
Environment=DISPLAY=:0
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

//reload the daemon
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
// Enable the service
$ sudo systemctl enable autoplay.service
//start the service
$ sudo systemctl start autoplay.service