Is a PERFECT seamless looped video possible with H264?

[angie_taylor]

Hi everyone,

I've been struggling with this issue for a while. I create looping animations that are generally viewed in browsers. When I create them in AE they loop perfectly, both video and audio are great. But when I render the movie in AME and then play it on loop, there's like a buffering pause at the beginning of each loop, ruining the smooth playback.

I've tinkered around with settings, have searched high and low for a solution but there doesn't appear to be one? Am i wasting my time with this or is it possible to eliminate this? Even if I have to use "other software" like VLC or FFMPEG? I just want to know if I'm wasting my time trying to find a fix that just doesn't exists?

I've seen loads of complaints about it online, but so far, none of the suggested solutions have worked.

Thanks millions for any tried and tested solutions.

[Mylenium]

Unlikely that it will ever be perfect. I'm pretty sure if you enable performance profiling in the browser itself you'll see that this is simply caused by how it renders the page and the gigazillion tasks it runs on the side like continuously evaluating DOM objects, JS and CSS plus the networking stuff. Also recent updates to Chrome and Firefox have introduced more rigid memory limits to prevent excessive use and security issues which may further limit the RAM available. Same for the actual hardware-accelerated drawing functions.

Mylenium

[angie_taylor]

Thank you, I suspected it was impossible, good to know I'm not going insane! 😉

[Rick Gerard]

Media players, especially web-based media players, do not loop perfectly. There is always a delay while the player resets. 

The solution is to design around that. Put a pause somewhere in the middle of your comp, then loop the comp and just render between the pauses. That way your video will start in the middle where the pause is and the seamless loop part will be in the middle of the animation.

Unless you are doing all of your animations as code using Adobe Animate, there is no other reasonable solution. 

[angie_taylor]

Sadly its a continuous audio loop so pausing is problematic, but thanks Rick 🙂