Play a movie one frame at a time on a color ePaper display.

Single frame from the TV mini series Scavengers Reign

Project Background and Inspiration

I was inspired by the works of Bryan Boyer’s “Creating a Very Slow Movie Player” and Tom Whitwell’s "How to Build a Very Slow Movie Player for £120 in 2020"

I found myself playing around with trying to make some changes to how it all worked and ended up rewriting the code from the ground up. I was running in to trouble with FFMPEG on a Pi Zero W and found that OpenCV could do a lot of the same video processing and it could do it easier as well. It does seem a little silly to to use OpenCV for this, when I’m just extracting frames from a video file, but here we are.

The ePaper Movie Frame

You can find my version of this project (ePaper Movie Frame) over on Github. I’d love to hear any feedback anyone has. It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but I’m working on making a web based front end to help manage the playback. Right now it’s all via command line.

I wend to the trouble of making a timelapse to show up how it updates over time, but in hindsight, a photo frame that updates every hour makes for a very uninteresting timelapse that is impossible to show the passage of time in a close up. I’ll make another one near a window or something soon. In the mean time I’ve added a video of just the frames updating in real-time so you can see what that process looks like. It takes a big longer with a full color ePaper display compared to a black & white display, which have gotten quite quick over the years.