Watch Your Favorite Movie Over the Course of Months with the Very Slow Movie Player
Tom Whitwell's project consists of an ePaper display, a Raspberry Pi, an SD card, and an IKEA frame, all of which cost under $150.
It’s been two years since Bryan Boyer designed his Very Slow Movie Player — an ePaper display that shows films at 24 frames per hour, rather than 24 frames per second. Putting the amount of time it takes to play a 110-minute movie into perspective would take roughly a year to complete from start to finish. Tom Whitwell didn’t want to sit that long to watch a movie, so he made his VSMP play a 110-minute movie (in this case, Psycho) at just under three months, or around two minutes of screen time for every 24 hours.
Whitwell's VSMP build is pretty simple, only using five components. These include a 7.5" ePaper display, a Raspberry Pi 4, a power supply, a 64Gb SD card with NOOBS, and a picture frame from IKEA. It’s fairly straightforward to put together as there is no soldering and engineer-level coding involved. Even the EPD comes equipped with all the necessary connections for the Pi.
With all of the components in place, Whitwell then used SSH to control the panel through the command line. He also tasked STFP to transfer large movie files onto the Pi, with final polishing using Nano.
It should be noted that Whitwell discarded the glass in the picture frame and spray painted it, and the mounting card, black to make the display more prominent. He has uploaded a complete walkthrough of his VSMP in his Medium blog post for those who would like to recreate his project.
[h/t: Raspberry Pi]