Raspberry π

Something like https://www.fruugo.co.uk/video-greeting-card-video-brochure-electronic-greeting-card-with-lcd-screen-for-birthday-gift-fathers-day-mothers-day-christmas-anniversary/p-206523097-439462834 is probably cheaper/easier

Some play when the card is opened and stop when closed with a bit of cardboard under a switch.

Pi 5 seems overkill. If it's a 5" screen it's not going to be a load of 4k stuff (or it shouldn't be).

No, it's going to be 1080p. but given it's still under £100 might as well.

@jellybaby that's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure the memory would be enough on one of those (the film is very long).

Am I going down the right route with a Raspberry Pi?

Looks like folks have done similar e.g.

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/the-wondry/build-a-button-driven-video-player-using-a-raspberry-pi/

Used a zero but I'd still go for max oomph.

Complexity may well be around how seemless you want the button press process to be.

Anyone succesfully wrangled bluetoothctl to get a headless setup to auto-find and pair to a bluetooth speaker? It seems straightforward enough, and I have discovered and trusted my headphones as a test, but they won't connect after that and "scan on" doesn't pick them up most of the time now.

It will allow me to fire up my invader.fm player when others are in the lounge and listen anywhere within headphone range. Yes I could do this via my phone/tablet/chromebook directly, or install the gui OS on th pi zero and connect manually each time via vnc as I used to before the rebuild, but where would we all be without pointless* projects to get lost in?

'*Once done for this, I could look to pair it with a minirig or similar and do a mini bike sound system for a noisy commute, but even then an old skool ghetto blaster in a carrier bag still seems to be the Manchester crowd chosen method for this.

sounds like this guy took a similar journey and has documented some of the pitfalls and references you might need in the .README on his repo.

https://github.com/tmckay1/pi_bluetooth_auto_connect

notably he mentions something about command line not working to auto connect and having to use the UI to turn on bluetooth visibility on the pi