Airport advertising sign, looks like they forgot to make the looping video full screen.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Who runs a full desktop on these things
Hey, as long as it works...
It's not running an individual desktop for each screen. The screens are just mirrored to one desktop.
You'll usually have a couple of "ad desktops" and then you just hook up multiple screens all over your facility to those desktops, so you have some redundancy and can easily run different ad cycles so they all don't sync up.
This airport
Yeah, I wonder will mpv run on its own, without any DE? At least we can run Kodi that way, but I guess at least some video players are able to run without any DE or even WM. If not all, but I’m not really sure on this.
It's totally doable from CLI. A script using either mpv - - vo=drm should be a good starting point.
I think on X server you could just use startx or xinit as well.
Not sure about mpv, but I use a gstreamer pipeline to tender cameras to the raw KMS terminal display. It works much more reliably (I.e. Predictable loading times and no stutter) compared to loading a DE first. Noting that it was on a low power RPI.
I used to run LibreELEC (a standalone Kodi with some very basic locked down Debian) on a Raspberry Pi 2B with 2 GB microSD card. Works very well running 1080P H264 content (version 1.2, version 1.1 does not run 1080P well) over LAN.
I upgraded the setup for Orange Pi PC One, as it allows to be less picky about what I download, and decodes H265. But even RPi2 is quite capable, especially when you need to loop one video, which you can encode as you like.
Saying that, it’s surprising someone would even consider running a full blown Ubuntu on it. To me, that’s a sign of a sheer incompetence. I have no other explanation for this phenomenon.