GPU-accelerated video playback with NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi

NetBSD 7 gained support for hardware acceleration on the Raspberry Pi last January, and OMXPlayer was subsequently imported into Pkgsrc. This combination allows seamless video playback directly in console.

For testing this setup, I used Jun Ebihara's prebuilt NetBSD RPi image and packages.

Installing OMXPlayer using binary packages:

pkg_add omxplayer

Playing a video after blanking the screen:

omxplayer -b captain-comic.avi

This works unsurprisingly well and the player is quite pleasant to use.