When I did my earlier post RPi3A+ with 2.2" PiTFT robogary had asked about whether I had tried streaming movies.
My main use for the small display is probably going to be a text console, but I thought it would be interesting to see how usable it would be with video.
I am running all of these tests in HDMI mirror mode (fbcp - frame buffer copy) and all use omxplayer.
The first test was to download a short clip of the Big Buck Bunny video and play it as a file stored locally on the RPi.
omxplayer bigbuckbunny_30sclip.mp4
Second was to stream the Big Buck Bunny video from the internet:
omxplayer --avdict rtsp_transport:tcp --win 0,0,640,480 --live --video_queue 4 --fps 30 --no-osd rtsp://wowzaec2demo.streamlock.net/vod/mp4:BigBuckBunny_115k.mov
And finally, to view an RTSP stream from my Driveway IP camera (used to monitor mail, package deliveries, garbage pickup, etc).
omxplayer --win "0 32 640 480" rtsp://admin:password@ipaddr --live
Unfortunately, I wasn't careful to match resolutions of the BBB videos and on top of that my iPhone (or my use of it) has never been able to capture the TFT screen images as well as my eye perceives them. That is to say, that I found the images to be reasonable for a small screen. I also thought that the video rendered cleanly. I doubt that I would ever use this for videos if my iPhone was handy, but it might be useful as an inconspicuous camera monitor.
