[jacopom]

I am a video artist and I generally load my content on a raspberry pi to display my work in galleries.

It's usually either a .mov or a .mp4 file with an H.264 stream, 1920x1080 @29.97fps ( around 20Kbps ).

I then create a non-smart m3u playlist with a single video file and set it to "Repeat all" to loop it.

Now in the past my work ended with a fade to black on the loop and everything worked great, never noticed any issues.

This piece I'm working on loops on a fade to and from white. This revealed a problem as the player switches to a fullscreen black frame between the end and the beginning of the loop. it's probably less then a second but it's very noticable. ( and no it is not the last frame of my video )

I don't think there is an option to get rid of the "black frame" in the gap ( please correct me if I'm wrong ) but, is there a format that would loop "more seamlessly"?

Or any other trick to loop a single file seamlessly? I'm open to suggestions.

[ On a side note when I add a .m3u non-smart playlist to the favorites kodi deliberately ignores the repeat all settings and plays my video just once.
Is that really the behavior it is meant to have? I've tried openelec, osmc and they both have that issue too. ]

Thanks,
Jacopo

[PatK]

I just tried one of my white short clips, and it played flawlessly white to white... The hardware of my system may mask shortcoming of the rasp. so take all of this with a grain of salt. The skin I'm using is Transparency! the OSD control panel has the repeat+ symbol for 1 time or continuous. The video is a short .avi so decoding is no effort for the computer. I do remember using something here Bookmarks and chapters (wiki) in which you could start at point A and play to point B and then loop it.... but you know the old saying, if you don't use it, you lose it.

In your case the rasp video engine might hiccup a partial sec to reload, or to enable some parm or it could just be the skin. Keep most of the video local with a large enough cache so fetching will not gliche.

This thread might be a bit more than you can handle http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1326856

perhaps others have an idea?

[jacopom]

I just found out you can install Kodi on mac as an app, I tried it to see if it did the same thing ( with the same exact 30 minutes long 5GB file ) and no black frame so yeah clearly a hardware limitation or something specific to the ARM implementation, either way nothing I can do ( my hopes were not that high )

Still I am not entirely sure I get how playlists don't repeat if played from the skin ( specifically from favorites ) or better, I understand they don't, I don't understand why that was set to be the default behavior, seems like an oversight. ( not trying to be rude I'm just curious to why that was the case )

Now feel free to ignore what comes next but in the video-art world "the support", "medium", "material", or "tangible" component of video-art is kind of an unresolved issue. In a time where no one has blue rays and your Iphone shoots better quality video than DVD, what follows might be slightly off topic but guaranteed to be relevant:

I feel bad even complaining, it's just that there is no player out there that does a really good job for professional video playback under $300.

A raspberry pi with Kodi is millions of times better than anything else I can afford but it's "almost perfect", that's what's so frustrating. ( less than a second on a 30 minutes video might seem picky but in certain circles that is a deal breaker, kills the suspension of disbelief: think fake surveillance monitor or huge projection on a theater show's background )

I really wish someone capable enough forked a distro based on Kodi with just a bunch of kiosk settings ( plug and play from USB- autoplay playlist - multiple channels with synchronized playback over Bluetooth or network [ RPI3 - that would be the dream ] ) and really smooth video looping (like a pre-buffering of the beginning of the next video in the playlist and continuous playback across files ) and ideally with an encrypted partition and hdcp safeguards for anti-piracy.

I know it's just one use case and it will never happen so I've been trying to adapt what Kodi is to my needs but hey if anyone figures out how to do this on a raspberry pi, even if they sold it at 1$ per license they would make millions ( as in: there is a huge demand in museums for cheap reliable and safe video playing systems, something like a SOC would really be ideal if the software did that stuff mentioned before ). I know every video student in America would buy a dozen.