UPDATE:

I’ve updated the software and it should be much easier to install and use on any Raspberry PI. It does NOT have a GUI interface any more, but is easier to just plug and play. It is now hosted on github and all updates will be pushed there.

https://github.com/timatron/videolooper-raspbian

For a show I did in Japan in 2012, I needed to have HD videos looping on two large TVs constantly. They needed to be foolproof and just start when the power was turned on and loop forever. I had two Raspberry Pis and decided to customize a version of Debian wheezy to automatically start looping videos when the computer booted up. It worked great, better than expected and the Raspberry Pis played video non-stop for over a month, in fact the power was never turned off and they never overheated, amazing!

So here is the SD Card image for the Raspberry Pi.

How To Setup The Video Looper

1. Copy this image to an SD card following these directions
2. Put your video files in the /home/pi/video directory
3. Boot your Pi!

Notes

1. To play MPEG files:
   1. Buy an MPEG decode key for your Raspberry Pi here
   2. Edit the config.txt on the FAT partition, on the last line replace the MPEG decode key
2. Video files must have .mpg or .mp4 file extensions for my script to pick them up (feel free to edit startvideo.sh to accommodate other extensions)
3. If you hit ESC when the videos are playing it will quit the video and the looper
4. If you put your mouse in the bottom right hand corner you will see two icons, one is to start the video looper and one is to stop it
5. There is about 1 second of black in-between videos
6. I left the SSH server turned on, in case you need to get in remotely
7. You should expand the root partition so you can store more videos
8. The username/password are pi/raspberry as with the standard raspian installs
9. The two main files are /home/pi/startvideo.sh and /home/pi/stopvideo.sh
10. There is a custom .desktop file in /home/pi/autostart that runs startvideo.sh when X starts

Enjoy!