bdplay adds a USB entry to the BirdDog PLAY’s source dropdown and plays video, stills and PDFs from a USB stick straight out of HDMI — hardware decoded, in order or shuffled, looping until you stop it.
The PLAY is an NDI/SRT decoder: it has no notion of local media. This turns one into a signage player without giving up anything — select NDI again and the stock decode path comes straight back.
Before you rely on this: every claim here was measured on a real BirdDog PLAY — hardware video decode, HDMI audio, stills, PDF rendering, the exFAT mount and the display handover with BirdDog’s own decoder are all confirmed working on hardware.
That is one unit on one firmware version. It has not been tested across the range of PLAY and Pod firmwares in the field, and USB hotplug with a physical stick is still unverified — testing used a loop device and internal storage.
This codebase was created with AI assistance, directed and reviewed by a human author.
Installing
The easy way is a checkbox in the PLAY Patcher, which assembles the firmware package in your browser — no toolchain, nothing to build.
To install by hand, copy the binary and its service unit onto the unit over SSH (port 9031 on stock BirdDog firmware) and enable the service.
On start it patches the video settings page to add the USB option. bdplay -unpatch-ui removes it
again — the stock page is untouched apart from one added option.
Using it
Open the PLAY’s own web UI, go to the video settings page, and pick USB from Source Selection. A panel appears with the stick’s contents.
There is also a standalone control page on port 8091, which additionally shows the log — use that if the injected panel does not appear, and use it first when something will not play, because the log answers most of those questions.
Everything is drivable from the API too, so a Companion button or a cron job works.
What it plays
| Type | Formats | How |
|---|---|---|
| Video | mp4, mov, mkv, avi, ts, m2ts, mpg, webm, wmv | Hardware H.264/HEVC/VP8/VP9 — ~11% of one core at 1080p |
| Stills | jpg, png, bmp, gif, webp, tif | Scaled to the panel with aspect preserved, held for a configurable dwell |
| Pages pre-rendered to images, then played as stills — 3 pages at 1080p in ~1.3 s | ||
| Office | pptx, docx, … | Not rendered. Listed with “export to PDF” rather than silently ignored |
PowerPoint is deliberately out of scope. Rendering it on-device would mean either a full office suite — which will not fit or perform on 2 GB and four small cores — or a partial renderer that misdraws SmartArt, charts and embedded fonts, looking broken in exactly the situations where a deck matters. Exporting to PDF is one step and renders exactly as authored.
Playback options
- Selection — one file, one folder (optionally including subfolders), or the whole stick.
- Order — as listed (natural sort, so
slide2precedesslide10) or random. - Loop — on by default.
- Dwell — how long each still or PDF page holds the screen.
Random reshuffles the whole set each cycle rather than picking independently, so every file plays once per cycle instead of some repeating while others starve — and the reshuffle never puts the item that just played at the front of the next cycle.
If something will not play
| Symptom | Cause |
|---|---|
| The USB option does not appear | The UI patch did not land. Use the standalone control page on port 8091. |
| A file is listed but will not play | Read the log on that page — it answers most of these. |
| A PowerPoint file is listed and does nothing | Deliberate. Export it to PDF. |
| The stick was not picked up | Hotplug with a physical stick is the one path still unverified. Re-seat it, or reboot with it in. |
| NDI stopped when I selected USB | Correct — the stock decoder hands over the display. Select NDI again and it comes back. |