looping playback

[Mark Suszko]

Your most complete answer will come from the digital signage forum or live stage forum, because what you are describing is a digital signage application. There are a number of boxes you can buy, – DOREMI comes to mind, but there are many more – that will play loops and do even more cool things, and they can be fed overnight over an ethernet hookup from your desk, so you can re-arrange clips just like playlists in your ipod.

The very quick and dirty thing you can do until then is to use the “share’ function from your FCP timeline to burn a 2- hour DVD of clips, and you can tell the share function to skip a menu and just launch immediately, what they call “first play”. This makes a looping DVD without pauses for menus, that will run forever or until the player burns out. Players are like $29 at the local drugstore now.

[Steve Eisen]

There are many playback options. Apple TV, Various Media players, DVD, etc. To eliminate a glitch, add 5 frame black at the beginning and end of your movie. For DVD, you do not need to make a 2 hour movie. You can create a DVD with just one clip. In DVDSP, set First Play and End Play to your movie to continuously loop.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Creative Pro Users Group

[Mark Suszko]

My reasoning for laying down multiple copies of the clip or clips to fill a 2-hour DVD is that my way, it only has to stop and seek to the beginning of the disk once every two hours, the rest of the time it is just incrementally playing across the disk.

If you put one short five minute clip on a DVD and set it to loop, the DVD player’s mechanically driven play head is going to do a lot more seeking than straight-ahead playing, interrupting playback, if only briefly, every five minutes, all day, versus once every two hours when nobody is likely to see it happen. To me, my method is less likely to lead to early mechanical failure. And a glitch in one segment of the 2-hour DVD would go by without comment, but a glitch in the ONLY five-minute program you’re looping would stick out plainly, every five minutes.

But that’s all kind of academic: the DVD method is a fast, cheap, stopgap expedient while he shops for a solid state or hard drive based MPEG player solution.

[Larry Chadwick]

Your easiest/cheapest route is a DVD player. If HD is needed, then blu-ray will work too, if you have the means to create a blu-ray disc. If you can find an HD-DVD player that would work, as DVDSP can create HD DVDs.. An apple TV, or a WD TV would work. You can load mutiple files and changed the play back (loop, repeat all, etc)

We have had DVDs on loop for years without fail, for our lobby displays, trade show displays, traveling shows, etc.

I wouldn’t worry about making (1) 2 hour long looping sequence vs (1) 5 min loop.. if anything make it a half hour and call it a day.

Larry Chadwick
Video/Finishing Editor
Pluto Post
hellopluto.com
larrychadwick.com

[William Carr]

The only consumer media player I have found that will play a seamless loop with NO menu appearances is a Western Digital 1TB Live Hub (not the smaller one) using a USB in the front port. I called them and they confirmed this was their only model to do so- they say it is a “living art” and “digital signage” feature.
https://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=570

Otherwise a Bright Sign unit will do it but needs setup from a Windows PC.
https://www.brightsign.biz/products/hd-product-line/hd220/

And there are certainly more expensive and complicated options, but these are sub-$400 scenarios.

[Phil Sheldon]

hi there

thank you all for your help and input. as usual, this forum has helped us out brilliantly

cheers for now

P