bouclette \bu.klɛt\ féminin
Petite boucle de poils ou de cheveux. (Small curl of hair or fur.)
A Raspberry Pi 4/5 kiosk appliance that boots directly into a fullscreen video player.
No desktop, no login prompt — just plug in a USB drive with video files and it plays.
Inspired by videolooper.de and Adafruit Pi Video Looper, both of which rely on omxplayer — a player that has since been deprecated and removed from Raspberry Pi OS. Bouclette is built on mpv instead, and adds a heads-up display (chapter progress bar, circular progress indicator, chapter list) and support for navigating chapters and files with a regular €10 PC remote.
- Plays all video files found on a USB drive (
mp4,mkv,avi,mov,ts,webm,flv,m4v,wmv) in alphabetical order, looping forever - Waits for a USB drive to appear at boot; resumes automatically if it is unplugged and reinserted
- Renders directly on the HDMI framebuffer via DRM/KMS — no X11 or Wayland
| Button | Key | Action |
|---|---|---|
| ◻ | Tab |
Play / Pause video |
| ◻ ×2 | ENTER |
Hide / Display informations |
| △ | Page Up |
Previous chapter |
| ▽ | Page Down |
Next chapter |
| ⊕ | Vol + |
Volume up (sent via HDMI CEC) |
| ⊖ | Vol - |
Volume down (sent via HDMI CEC) |
A USB presentation remote (~€10) works perfectly as a wireless controller.
Build the image (see BUILD.md) or download the latest from the releases page, then unzip and flash it to a microSD card:
unzip pi-gen/deploy/bouclette-*.zip
# replace /dev/sdX with your card device
sudo dd if=bouclette-*.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progressOr use the Raspberry Pi Imager (v2.0.4
or later) and select the .img file with "Use custom".
The system is accessible over SSH:
ssh bouclette@bouclette.local
Default password: bouclette
Playback logs are available with:
journalctl -u bouclette -f