Developer Shares Nine-Year Struggle to Run Digital Signage Software on Raspberry Pi

A software developer has documented nearly a decade of attempts to make his open-source digital signage application, garlic-player, run smoothly on Raspberry Pi hardware. Early efforts on the Pi 3 around 2017–2018 were hampered by the lack of zero-copy display output in Qt, causing video stuttering even at low CPU loads, despite partial workarounds using a GPU-based tool called PiOmxTextures. A breakthrough for smooth HD playback was eventually achieved in 2018, but it broke WebView and multi-zone layout support — two key features of the application — with no useful error output to diagnose the cause. The 2019 release of the Raspberry Pi 4 brought hardware improvements including dual HDMI ports, but hardware-accelerated video decoding was only available on the 32-bit OS, while the more capable 64-bit Raspbian remained in beta without acceleration. 4K video support also proved unreliable, working only in VLC under specific conditions, leaving the developer repeatedly forced to choose between a modern operating system and functional hardware decoding.
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