Part of working with your Raspberry Pi is learning to code in Python to take advantage of working directly with the device. While the Adafruit WebIDE is one of the easiest way to roll up your sleeves and build from nothing — you may also find for certain projects that you will want to install packages that have great tools and functionality already built-in.
Take some time to check out what is out there; adding in code snippets doesn’t just help you get what you need more quickly, it helps you learn how others have solved the problems you are tackling.
A great tool used for more than just games — also for playing back media and setting up lightweight interactive GUIs.
Pygame is a set of Python modules designed for writing games. Pygame adds functionality on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the python language. Pygame is highly portable and runs on nearly every platform and operating system. Pygame itself has been downloaded millions of times, and has had millions of visits to its website.
In many ways the go-to package for playing back compressed media in Python, but make sure you prepare for the dependencies and set your expectations for what media can be played back over a $35 computer at an appropriate level.
is a Python module for wav, mp3, ogg, avi, divx, dvd, cdda etc files manipulations. It allows you to parse, demutiplex, multiplex, decode and encode all supported formats. It can be compiled for Windows, Linux and cygwin.
PyMedia was built to be really simple and flexible at the same time. See tutorial for example. It allows you to create your own mutimedia applications in a matter of minutes and adjust it to your needs using other components. Python language is choosen because of simple semantics, complete and reach set of features.
Take a look at the PyCar application which takes advantage of the PyMedia library extensivelly and can turn your PC into the powerful car media center.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.