The easiest thing would be to use a google drive syncing app (Unfortunately google does not have an official one for linux) any of these should do just fine.
I’ve used RClone (the second one from that list) and it was easy to set up and I had no issues using it.
Then some sort of slideshow software like this can loop through the directory playing photos and videos.
That does look convenient. I tried testing it out but couldn’t get the image to mount in either QEMU or VirtualBox. Not sure if it was a problem with the image or me; it has been a while since I futzed around with virtual machines.
This should be fine on wifi but will likely need its own power source as TV Usb ports rarely put out more that 500mA and a Pi can require up to 2.5A peak.
I second that – the the worst thing is that it can work for a while at low amps, but “randomly” fail when under heavier loads. That happened to me and wasted a few hours of my time trying to debug it.
I did a bit of research on this but misplaced the rpi I’d been planning to use. If one can be found, this blog post describes the scripts and packages needed:
Raspberry Pi photo frame using the pictures on your Google Drive II – Dr John’s Tech Talk
Some interesting stuff there, although no solutions for displaying videos.
I tested my earlier suggestions of using VLC and MPlayer. VLC does what I want – I can point to a directory and it plays everything, with images lasting ten seconds by default (and I assume that’s configurable). However, VLC would hang for about five seconds when switching files, and when switching to a video, when it finally started responding again, it would be five seconds into the video.
Very janky. CPU usage spikes to a 100% during the hang. This is on Fedora, don’t know if it’s a VLC issue or something exterior to it. But as long as it doesn’t happen on the pi, it seems like VLC would be the simplest option (if that slideshow distro mentioned earlier doesn’t pan out).
I tested out Mplayer as well, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t support mixing formats. It can do a slideshow of images, but not images and videos.
There’s this suggestion for a simple shell script mixing mplayer and feh, but I imagine the transitions would be janky (although with a stripped down window manager, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad).