Miss the old days when omxplayer magically played media via command line on a pi zero? It will still work on Buster, but omxplayer was killed off when the Raspberry Pi Foundation deprecated OpenMAX and dispmanx, leaving anyone running a modern OS without a simple command-line video player. VLC is too heavy, mpv has mixed hardware acceleration support, and nothing just works the way omxplayer did.

So I built ZeroPlay. It's a lightweight H.264 video player for the Pi Zero 2W using the modern Linux stack: V4L2 M2M hardware decode, DRM/KMS display, ALSA audio. Zero CPU video decode, zero X11, zero Wayland. Just SSH in and play a file. Naturally had to test it with a rick roll.

**One-line install:**

    curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HorseyofCoursey/zeroplay/main/install.sh | sudo bash

**What works:**

* H.264 up to 1080p30 High@L4.1 (tested with Big Buck Bunny Sunflower)
* MP4 and MKV containers including non-standard resolutions
* Seeking, looping, volume control, mute, chapter navigation
* Files with no audio, multiple audio tracks
* Smooth playback on cold boot from SD card

**What doesn't work:**

* HEVC/H.265 — bcm2835 hardware decoder doesn't support it
* Subtitles tracks are ignored

It's early but it's been tested on a range of real-world files and holds up well. Would love feedback from anyone who tries it, especially if you hit files that don't play correctly.

Future Development:

* Ensuring it works smoothly in Bookworm, not just Trixie.
* Getting the original pi zero w to work.

GitHub: [https://github.com/HorseyofCoursey/zeroplay](https://github.com/HorseyofCoursey/zeroplay)

Introducing ZeroPlay: an omxplayer replacement for the Pi Zero 2W