[MPlayer-users] smooth looping with mplayer

[Dean S. Messing]

I hope this is not a "RTFM" (which I have diligently tried to do!) question.

I have some short, experimental, research clips (mostly
raw/uncompressed .avi files) on which I wish to loop indefinately for
some visual experiments.  I know about `-loop 0' but it is not doing
what I want.  With `-loop 0', mplayer seems to "restart" at the end of
the clip which makes it (and the video sequence) flash annoyingly.  Also
the display window is repositioned from where I moved it.

Anyway, if I play the clip with ImageMagick `animate' it loops quite
smoothly, as though the clip was simply concatinated to itelf an
infinite number of times.

Also I discovered that I can almost get the smooth looping in
mplayer by (in the gui) hitting the "go to beginning and start
again" botton.  The transition to the beginning is instantaneous.
But this is a pain when you are running psycho-physical experiments.

What I would like is for mplayer to automatically do precisely this
"go to beginning and start again" just as it finishes displaying the
last frame of the sequence.

Is there anyway to do this?

                               Dean S. Messing
                               Display Algorithms & Visual Optimization Lab
                               Information Systems Technologies Dept.
                               Sharp Laboratories of America