[MPlayer-users] First few seconds of movie are skipped when movie loops

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 10:01:15PM +0200, Marcin Gałczyński wrote:
> 
> >It can be any of these.
> 
> >>MPlayer SVN-r35234-4.7.2 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team
> 
> >This is ancient, from October 2012.
> >So most likely it is the bug I fixed since then.
> >Though it could be yet another bug.
> >Or it could be a broken file that incorrectly does not
> >mark the first frame as a key frame.
> >Lastly, it is kind of an issue with your command-line.
> >Putting the -loop 0 before the file name will avoid it,
> >though it might behave a bit less smooth.
> 
> At the same time I was exploring the issue and found a solution
> which was to change the file format from mp4 to matroska in my
> ffmpeg tools settings (not sure if mp4 format goes along libx264
> encoder anyhow...). When I will have some more time I will check
> with the latest mplayer version and post issue here if error
> persists, along with the link to faulty movie. This seems however
> like a bug in the loop handling (re-wind into wrong position?),
> because when I used left/right arrows to seek the movie in it's
> later iterations, I was able to get back to the skipped over part
> with no issue.

In that case it's probably fixed, and the issue is that your file
actually starts slightly before 0.
Before the fix, MPlayer would always seek to 0, which the would give
exactly the effect you experienced if the file started before 0.
This is also consistent with it only happening with mp4, I believe
that format is more likely to use negative time stamps (on the other
hand I believe that was actually due to a FFmpeg bug, so I very much
think you should try to update your tools, your workflow is probably
affected by multiple bug fixes).