mplayer seamless loop in Raspberry Pi


Have you ever tried to run a video on an infinite loop with mplayer?

You will find that most players (including VLC) will do a ‘restart’ after each loop. That stuttering is very annoying when you are trying to build a kiosk mode screen display.

We can achieve a seamless infinite video loop with mplayer with a command like this:

mplayer -fs videofile.xyz -loop 0

Please note the “-loop 0” option is at the end. If you put this option before the file name, it will cause a restart on every loop. Apparently, this behavior comes from a very old quirk

Raspberry Pi + Java R2D2 Robot – Part 2


We started this project during the pandemic, back in 2020 as project for my kids.

Today R2D2 gave it’s first baby steps on the house. Lot’s of work ahead handling obstacles, video recognition, among others… but a lot of fun!

R2D2 vision camera while walking the house.

Interior of the tube. Raspberry Pi 3. Servo Motor Conroller. Voltage regulator and battery.

My kids practicing some soldering….

Part 1 is documented here: https://vivani.net/2020/04/27/raspberry-pi-java-r2d2-robot-part-1/

Java code available here: https://github.com/hvivani/Robotics/tree/master/R2D2