Films shot in black & white look great on the eInk display. Since this guy entered the public domain, Steamboat Willie is a natural choice. I downloaded the webm file here from Wikimedia. You can then process the file with a video editor or online converter to go from WebM to MP4, which is a good file format for ffmpeg to play back.
Contrast
The Slow Movie player scripts grab a single frame at a time from the movie file and applies dithering to work on the 1-bit eInk display. I've found that some low-contrast images don't dither well with default settings. You can boost the contrast in the adafruit_slowmovie.py command arguments with -c 4.5 for example.
This should generally do the trick, however you may also choose to do a pass of image adjustments or exposure/gamma correction in a video editor as I did here with Steamboat Willie.
Dithering
The default dithering used to make the 1-bit eInk display appear to show shaded grayscale images is a Floyd-Steinberg algorithm. This guide has much more info on dithering for eInk displays. You could potentially pre-process your images for a specific look by pre-dithering the movie files and then disabling dithering in the adafruit_slowmovie.py script.
Page last edited November 12, 2025
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