> The deprecation of OMXPlayer has been problematic for one, since I rely on some custom applications which need to be able to have some fairly precise/low latency requirements between when you tell it to start playing vs when the playback actually starts, etc. I haven’t found a suitable mechanism which meets our reqs on a Pi for controlling/playing videos yet since that deprecation.

Yeah. The Pi3 -> Pi4/5 jump was quite a massive change in how things work. I've been writing my own playback engine for 10 years now and that one was quite challenging. Precise playback start is something my software supports: You control everything in Lua and can, for example, preload a video and then start it based on either internal logic or based on an external trigger. Up to the Pi3, my software also supports dynamically adjusting the HDMI clock, so the vsyncs of multiple displays are synchronized. Customers have been using that for almost 10 years for video wall playback.

If you go with the hosted version of the software, provisioning is as simple as extracting a single 60MB zip file to an empty SD card and placing that into the Pi. If needed you can even use the API to preconfigure that ZIP file to include settings like WiFi.