looping video

[arturiusrex]

Hi! Friends,

I am trying to make a video clip run in a seamless loop which I can display from the CD/DVD drive or directly from the hard drive but every method I try ends up with a pause between the end of the clip and the restart (before I even burn it to a disk). Thinking that disk access time might be the problem, I have also tried running the loop from a USB flash drive but it did not help. Can anyone tell me what might be causing the problem and, more important, how it can be overcome?

So far I have experimented with using various screensaver makers, using an HTML file to make a looping call to the video clip residing on my hard drive and putting a looping link in a DVD timeline. Another possibility may be to buffer the data stream as is done in streaming technology but, unfortunately, I have not discovered how such buffers are set up so I haven't been able to try this. The task seems simple enough but nothing I have tried so far seems to work. I should add that I can run a seamless loop while in the Adobe Premiere Pro editing mode but that's the best I have been able to do until now. Also, I would like to maintain the original quality of the clip which is 640x480 DV from a camcorder.

Helpful advice would be greatly appreciated.

Ed

[setarip]

Have you tried simply setting Windows Media Player (Preferably good ol' version 6.4) as follows?:

Options>>Playback>>Rewind when done playing

[arturiusrex]

Thanks, setarip, for the suggestion. I found a copy of WMP 6.4,8.2 (I'm using Windows XP) and set it up as you suggested. I then tried to use it to play a 20 second dv avi clip and it certainly looped but it always showed the hesitation at the start. I also tried playing an mpeg2 version of the same file and again it looped but with different results each time it restarted. For example, sometimes it just stalled for perhaps a tenth of a second while at others the whole video picture seemd to convulse just after the stall had ended. Very strange that!

Since the stall is present for each solution I have tried, it seems to me that the problem must lie in some common feature of these different approaches, such as access times associated with closing one play and then starting it again. The fact that I get the same result with a flash drive seems to rule out hard drive seek times but it could be associated with closing and reopening a decompression process or even the mechanics of restarting the timeline for the loop process itself.

I'm sure there is an answer but to find it I need to understand the root cause of the problem. Not wishing to try your patience, but if you have any further suggestions, they would certainly be very much appreciated. The same goes of course for any other interested reader of this thread.

Ed

[setarip]

"I found a copy of WMP 6.4,8.2"

Actually, all you have/had to do is:

Desktop>>Start>>Run>>MPLAYER2.EXE


"if you have any further suggestions"

I'm afraid I have no additional suggestions...