On the v5 version, start by booting the player with no media to play, and a usb keyboard attatched- Any Video playing would be in foreground, hiding the text. After the startup video, the screen will be blank.

To get to the login screen, press CTRL & C to exit the player and get to the text console. Continue below to learn how to make changes to the system.

Configure Wireless Network

To use WiFi, set up a wireless router with a network name and password. Then, as soon as the logo video starts, press CTRL-C to exit to console. Type “sudo raspi-config” and press enter. Go to Performance Options > Overlay Filesystems and in the following dialog, Choose “No” to deactivate Read-Only mode. Back in the main menu, exit and choose to reboot. When the logo video starts again, repeat the steps above to get back into raspi-config. First, go to “Localisation” menu and choose the country for the correct wireless lan standards. Back in the main menu, go to “System options” and choose “Wireless LAN”, a dialog comes up asking for network name and passwort. After choosing to quit the program with a reboot, your player should connect to your wifi network.

Acces via Network

Get started with a Raspi with ethernet or WiFi, and connect it to your network, so you can easily login via ssh to make changes to the script, other files or the system in general:

User pi, password mp4museum, find your IP with this guide from raspberrypi.org

Windows SSH Client: Download PuTTy

Mac: Use the Terminal App and type ssh pi@(add IP here, or try “mp4musem.local” instead of IP)

Many commands involve sudo to get admin access, so be careful. Or not, you can always re-write the standard image 😉 There is no such thing as failure, just call it “iterative design”.

Configure for Write Access onto SD Card

After logging in, start by reconfiguring the filesystem for write access.

sudo raspi-config

Go to “Performance Options” > “Overlay Filesystem”, and then choose “No” to disable overlay filesystem. Exit the program and choose “Reboot”. Wait a bit for the video logo, then press CTRL-C again.

Edit the main script

With Nano, you get a basic text editor in the console. For example, use

nano mp4museum.py

to open the main script file. It contains event handlers for button functionality, it is playing the startup logo film, and runs the main loop indexing and playing from USB.

After your changes are done, press “CTRL + X” to exit, and answer “y” to save the content of the editor to the file.

Note: On mp4m-sync, the player is started as a service, there is no script.

Enable Read-Only mode

Start by going into console, then launch the raspberry config tool with

sudo raspi-config

Go to “Performance Options” > “Overlay Filesystem”, and then choose “Yes” to disable overlay filesystem. Also, choose “Yes” to make boot read-only. Exit the program and choose “Reboot”. Wait a bit for the video logo, then press CTRL-C again. Type “touch test” and hit Enter, then “reboot” and enter. Another wait and CTRL-C later, check with “ls” (list files) if there is no file called “test”. If you can see it, type “rm test” and Enter, and redo the whole procedure of disabling overlay filesysten, reboot, enabling overlay filesystem, reboot & check.

Last but not least, find additional resources on GitHub