Prevent video to black between sequences

[indemnity83]

Loving falcon player, my Halloween show is just about complete but a couple of test runs have revealed a hiccup that I wasn't expecting. Between each sequence in my playlist, the video goes to black (I assume while it loads up the next sequence/video). This probably isn't a problem for most shows but I've cut together a continuous show using the AtmosFX Jack-O-Lantern Jamboree and my video is the projected faces of the narrating/singing pumpkins and each time they go to black the illusion is lost.

Is there any workaround to this short of trying to actually smoosh all 7 individual sequences into one? Even if it just held the last frame that would work, but I don't see any options around video output. 

Thanks in advanced

[Kensington Graves]

Look at page 103 of the manual for some ideas.  You could separate the video of the talking faces into its own video, then create an event trigger in your first sequence to run the video.  Or you could create a script to start the video and start the sequence.  I don't know whether those videos would continue running after the first sequence has finished, although I don't think there's an automatic "kill video" command if you simply trigger the video from the sequence.

[indemnity83]

Thanks, 

I'll try it, but the audio sync with the video is pretty critical and I'm not terribly confident that it won't drift over a 10-minute show. I may just have to cram all the sequences together into one continuous file.

[Kensington Graves]

Another possibility is to separate the different parts of the show onto master and remote FPPs, but you'd need to give a lot more details on how you have the show set up.  10 minutes isn't an unreasonable length for a single sequence, so that may be your best bet.

[dkulp]

Can you flip to master branch and give it a try?  In the settings on the UI tab, turn on Developer level for UI.   The developer tab should appear and then select "master" from the branch drop down. 

I've been working a bit on trying to reuse the VLC player instead of creating a new one each time.  It seems to work OK on my debian desktop, but I seemed to have messed up something with either the HDMI out on my Pi or my hdmi monitor so I cannot test on the Pi right now. 

[pixelpuppy]

Can you flip to master branch and give it a try?  In the settings on the UI tab, turn on Developer level for UI.   The developer tab should appear and then select "master" from the branch drop down.

I've been working a bit on trying to reuse the VLC player instead of creating a new one each time.  It seems to work OK on my debian desktop, but I seemed to have messed up something with either the HDMI out on my Pi or my hdmi monitor so I cannot test on the Pi right now. 

Dan, I played with this a bit and its worse.  It appears to be crashing or killing fppd.  Fppd restarts automatically, and the video jumps ahead about 5-10 seconds and plays to the end, but does not stay in sync (video plays faster than sequence).  Then at the end of the video fppd dies again.  After 5-10 seconds fppd auto-restarts and the cycle repeats.

Here is the error in the fppd.log
2020-10-18 18:01:21.758 (5728) mediaoutput/VLCOut.cpp:108: cannot estimate delay: Broken pipe

I also wanted to mention, that I was very impressed with the vlc sync prior to this change.  Overall it was working tremendously better than omxplayer was.    I don't loop videos so the black between each sequence is not an issue for  me.  I only did this to help test but I definitely need to fall back for showtime.

[indemnity83]

Coming back around on this, I never did smush all my sequences together, and have just been living with the black between sequences. I'm ok with it, but wondered if it was worth bringing back up for a couple thoughts. I won't pretend to understand how this is functioning in the background but I'm assuming that the black between sequences is the time to load everything, so two thoughts that can be quickly squashed if not feasible:

1) (optionally) hold the last frame of the finished sequence while the next one is loaded (in a new VLC instance)
2) Have an ability to have a "transition frame" (an image) that could be held in a second VLC instance running all the time and swapped to while loading?