# Scaryness selector



## sanityassassin (Mar 15, 2008)

I have been brainstorming an idea to have a push button to select how scary my yard display is. I have a few very small PCs that I got from work that will be running Linux that I will use to play the videos for my projectors. I plan to use a Raspberry Pi to send commands to each PC to play a different video playlist if I can figure that out. I have been able to remotely play video using SSH but that is as far as I have gotten so far. Any linux/raspberry pi gurus out there that may be able to point me in the right direction?


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## exascale (Jan 3, 2018)

I would use VLC on your projector 'client' machines. You can setup playlists there and then enable VLC's http interface that allows control of VLC from a web interface. You can figure out what http commands you need to start/stop a given playlist in a web browser and then capture those requests to use with a 'wget' command from your raspberry Pi controller.

This is a howto on setting up VLC's http interface:








How to Activate VLC’s Web Interface, Control VLC From a Browser, & Use Any Smartphone as a Remote


VLC includes a web interface, which you can enable to access your VLC player from a web browser, controlling playback from another device – particularly useful for a media center PC. VLC also offers a mobile web interface for smartphones.




www.howtogeek.com





Once you get that figured out you will need to do some python scripting on the Pi to read button presses on the GPIO pins and send out the appropriate http commands via wget to all your projector clients. I would envision if you have three levels of scary you would have three buttons connected to the Pi. Pressing any of the buttons would send a wget command to each of the clients to trigger the appropriate scary level playlist. You would also want to block the reading of any additional buttons presses for a period of time until the videos complete (to guard against someone mashing the buttons repeatedly). Another strategy would be to have the videos playing continuously and then a button press for a different scary level would stop the videos and switch to a different scary level playlist. You would also probably want to guard against excessive button presses by blocking input to change scary level for 10 seconds or so.


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