Hello, I have an animation of a mode shape from a finite element analysis I would like to look at in a loop. I'm currently using the following command line:
mplayer -loop 0 -really-quiet -speed .5 mode2.mpg

This does what I want, sort of.. the problem is that at the end of each time through the loop mplayer tears down the window showing the movie, then immediately rebuilds it. That hiccup is terribly distracting when you're trying to get a good sense of what is physically happening.

Is there a command line option to have mplayer keep the same window and just smoothly go from the last frame back to the first frame every time? I'm using MPlayer 1.0pre5-3.3.3 (on FC2)... is there a newer version that loops smoothly without the discontinuity/interruption, etc.?

Thanks...

I was doing some messing around with your problem and looping does not seem to be the answere in that it will always want to re-write the movie window, however, I found if you concatenate the same file over and over it will create a large looping file that will be interupted... such as:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -o loop.avi mode2.avi mode2.avi mode2.avi mode2.avi

This will combine 4 copies of your mode2.avi file into one seemless file...
You will notice that I used .avi because that is what I converted my .jpg files to first using:

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4

It may work with .mpg but have not tried it yet...

KC

I've been playing around & have found that if you turn on "Start in fullscreen" in the preferences, mplayer will always use it's fullscreen mode on every loop of the file it's playing thus giving a smooth transition between loops.
There are a few small issues though, but easily worked around.
The main one is that if I use the xv video driver the image is fullscreen but with some movies the screen is blanked between loops, yet if I <ALT> TAB it springs back to life. (mpegs mostly but not asf's, very strange) But, if I use the x11 driver, the image stays at it's original size & the rest of the screen is just blanked out, much better. I have found though that the first loop through the movie is played in the centre of the screen but for the rest of the loops it go's to the top left corner, but no big deal.

One more thing, maybe you know this, maybe you don't, but you can put options like looping into $HOME/.mplayer/config Like this:

Thanks for the help guys, but the results are still quite unsatisfactory so far (concatenating every file a bucket-full of times isn't really an option I want to pursue either, but I imagine it would be an acceptable one-time cludge).

Update: I've found that Xine doesn't have quirky looping behavior, so I'm going to have to go with that. (edit: of course, now I'm having trouble getting it to remember to keep going slow each time it loops... :/ )

Thanks again for the suggestions..