Published April 2, 2019 © GPL3+

High Resolution YouTube Player with Raspberry Pi

Sometimes a 1920x1080p screen just doesn't have enough pixels for you, so I created a way to watch YouTube videos with stunning clarity.

IntermediateFull instructions provided2 hours9,542

Things used in this project

Hardware components

DFRobot 64x64 RGB LED Matrix

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

Adafruit Matrix Driver HAT

Software apps and online services

Python IDE

Story

Purpose

Many times, I get bored of watching YouTube videos in HD on my monitor or TV, especially because they tend to not be very crisp. So I set out to create a way to view videos with amazing clarity. For that, I would need a Raspberry Pi 3 and a 64x64 RGB LED matrix.

1 / 2

Video

Libraries

The most important library is the rgb-led-matrix, which controls the pins for the matrix. Just follow Adafruit's instructions here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rgb-matrix-plus-real-time-clock-hat-for-raspberry-pi. Then I installed OpenCV with

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev python-opencv

Then I needed a way to get the youtube videos to display. I found a library called pafy, which handles that. I installed it with the following commands:

sudo python -m pip install youtube_dl
sudo python -m pip install pafy

Now that the necessary libraries were installed, I began to code.

Code

The program for this project goes through these steps:

Import libraries
Download video and convert it
Set up RGB matrix
Create OpenCV video capture
Loop through each frame of the video while converting it and sending it to the matrix

I set up the program to take a command line argument for the URL. Pafy then downloads the video and stores it. I configured the matrix to be 64 x 64 and have the 'adafruit-hat' mapping. Next, in order for OpenCV to get the frames of the video, I had to create a VideoCapture and pass in the video object. Lastly, the rpi-rgb-led-matrix library uses PIL to draw images to the matrix, so I converted the OpenCV image objects to PIL image objects with

display_img = Image.fromarray(image_resized)

The program keeps displaying the frames until the video is over or the program is halted.

Viewing

To start viewing the amazing videos, simply type

sudo python low_res_yt.py <youtube_video_url>

and then enjoy the stunning quality!

Code

Python Code

import pafy
import time
import sys
import numpy as np
from rgbmatrix import RGBMatrix, RGBMatrixOptions, graphics
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw
url = sys.argv[1]
video = pafy.new(url)
best = video.getbest(preftype="mp4")
options = RGBMatrixOptions()
options.rows = 64
options.cols = 64
options.chain_length = 1
options.parallel = 1
options.hardware_mapping = 'adafruit-hat'
matrix = RGBMatrix(options=options)
matrix.Clear()
import cv2
capture = cv2.VideoCapture()
capture.open(best.url)
success,image = capture.read()

FRAMERATE = 120

while success:
	image_resized = cv2.resize(image, (64,64), interpolation = cv2.INTER_AREA)
	image_resized = cv2.cvtColor(image_resized, cv2.COLOR_BRG2RGB)
	display_img = Image.fromarray(image_resized)
	matrix.SetImage(display_img.convert('RGB'))
	#cv2.imshow('frame',image_resized)
	#time.sleep(1/FRAMERATE)
	success, image = capture.read()

cap.release()
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Credits

Evan Rust

122 projects • 1083 followers

IoT, web, and embedded systems enthusiast. Contact me for product reviews or custom project requests.

High Resolution YouTube Player with Raspberry Pi

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Software apps and online services

Story

Purpose

Video

Libraries

Code

Viewing

Schematics

Wiring

Code

Python Code

Credits

Evan Rust

Comments

Embed the widget on your own site

High Resolution YouTube Player with Raspberry Pi

High Resolution YouTube Player with Raspberry Pi

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Software apps and online services

Story

Purpose

Video

Libraries

Code

Viewing

Schematics

Wiring

Code

Python Code

Credits

Evan Rust

Comments

Related channels and tags