Raspberry Pi Media Player

Info:	Hey Arnold! being played on a CRT TV
Info:	What more do you want from me!?

During the COVID-19 virus, and its following global quarantines, I found myself at home bored with nothing to do for about half a year.
This had caused me to become very indulgent in the Youtube ecosphere, notably the tech side of the internet. And once you start getting invested in tech, you can never leave it, at least in my opinion.
One thing that stuck with me during this time, was media collection and piracy. I wouldn't say that I am neccesarily poor, but I have been technically pirating media ever since I figured out what a movie was. shout out 123movies
I grew up in a household that loves music, so that was one of the first types of media collection I found myself doing, plus I was somewhat forced to use it, as spotify had not made its way to our country as yet, and the only other options were Audiomack (It did not have a wide range of music) and Youtube (Music) (This was good but you could not listen while the device was off, offline or in a different app. Unless, you had money for a subscription, and I decided that I was not going to ask my parents to spend money on something as menial as Youtube)

Fast forward a few years and I got interested in emulators and old games and software, at this point I would need a lot of storage space to contain my music, emulators and game files, so I bought a portable hard drive to keep them all. Additionally to my collection, I also started storing movies, anime and tv shows as power outages or wifi outages were somewhat common in my country. Now I personally loved watching anything older than me, especially anime, I don't know, there's just a certain feel to them, I have nothing against anything newer though, but I just really love older media.
Now, what does any of this have to do with a raspberry pi?, well as I just stated, I really love older content, but most if not all of them were designed with the 4:3 aspect ratio in mind, not a 16:9 ratio.
I did not mind watching them in 16:9, infact I still don't, but I came across a reddit post one day while I was looking for ways to watch 4:3 content on a CRT TV. And in the reddit post they stated that you could use a "a minimum of raspberry pi 2, and nothing more recent than the raspberry pi 3 model B+" and hook it up to your TV using an AV cable, something that I had never heard of before this.
But, despite my intial confusion, it seemed like a better way to watch stuff on a CRT TV, so I saved up some money, went onto Ebay and bought a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.

The struggle...

After buying the Raspberry Pi, I had to wait about two weeks for it to arrive; however, my excitement swiftly dwindled after I ran into multiple, frustrating issues.

The first issue that I experienced was an insufficent powersupply.
I spent my first day with it, trying to look for a sufficent micro-USB connection; the reddit post did actually warn against this, but I somewhat ignored it because my phone wall-charger was labeled with a 5V output but I was not thinking about the amperage; as such it kept on giving me an error about it being "undervoltage"
This was slightly upsetting, but, I did not follow the instructions afterall ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Another issue I faced was with the connection to the TV itself, the post outlined the need for a "4 Pole stereo cable". I remember seeing one laying around my house, but when I used it, I got the error seen in the infobox to the right.
This caused me a lot of confusion as my cable looked identical to the one that they were using, so whatever could be the issue???
Well the issue is the fact that all AV Cables are not made the same (as seen in this photo), and the one that I had, while looking very similar, was not designed for a TV input (or so it seemed..? i'm still unsure).

After this, I decided that it would be safe for me to buy both a case and the proper power supply, which then took another two weeks to be shipped to my country. Plus I had to buy a very specific 3.5mm 4 Pole Stero Out (I messaged someone on reddit(I never knew it had direct messaging)and they told me to buy either a Microsoft Zune cable, Xbox cable or an Apple cable)
During this wait, I came across this video on youtube about a VCR-Styled Media Player designed just for the RPI model that I had; Which I thought had easier instructions for its installation process than the OSMC OS that the reddit post had used.

Configuring and confusion

I now finally had everything, it was time to make it work, and... it did!
But how did I go about it?
So if I remember correctly, the first thing I did was nearly breaking the case trying to figure out how to fit the RPI inside it. Then after this, I had to install the Operating System on a MicroSD Card, which as I stated before, was fairly easy to do.

Then came the instiallation on the Raspberry Pi itself via the CRT TV, and oh boy, I could barely read anything because of how the text looks on the TV. After all the installing the OS worked flawlessly, well, not really; The author of the project had not really stated originally if you could use an external drive to play media off of, so I thought I might have done something incorrectly because I couldn't access my hard drive.

But because he had made the video showcasing the project so recently, and he was responding and hearting most comments left on said video, I simply asked him how I should go about accessing my external drive, luckily he answered pretty quickly and pointed me to a different project which deals with usb mounting, and he even updated his github page to mention this fix for people like me. I'm not going to lie I felt kinda pompous that I affected this project in a way lol.

But because of this I had to re-install everything again including the usb mounting thing, and now Finally!!! everything worked and I was able to watch my media on my TV!!!!!!

Images

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed doing this little project, it was a bit of an headache at first, but occaisonally now I will connect up everything and watch a 90s/2010s Anime or Hey Arnold on my TV.
One last thing that I did not mention is the fact that the Raspberry Pi easily overheats for some reason, i'm not sure if it's because of the model itself or the fact that I have a keyboard and a external hard drive drawing power fromthe usb ports... I did test something by using a regular thumbdrive instead and plugging out the keyboard whenever I started a queue, but it still overheats. This is quite annoying especially when i'm watching larger video files, as it just lags terribly, but i'm making the most of what I have for now.