Eliminate Repeat One Delay

I realise this may not be a very common use case, but increasingly looping animations are moving away from animated GIFs which can end up being very large in size, and towards more efficient video formats such as .mp4 or .webm containers.

Anyway, while VLC has a "Repeat One" playback option, it doesn't handle short loops very well, as it has a slight, but noticeable, pause between the end of the animation and looping back to the start, presumably because VLC is treating it like any other file being closed and opened. This happens even for very small files that should fit fully within a generous file buffer, presumably because the buffers are being discarded as VLC starts anew.

What I'd like to propose is that VLC attempt to optimise the Repeat One playback mode to eliminate this delay, to allow for smooth looping of files. As I see it there are two main candidates for doing this:

• Detect when the current file is in its final buffer (no more data needs to be loaded) and preload the next file in the playlist.
• Detect files that fit entirely within a single buffer and, if it is also the next file in the playlist, simply retain the buffered data rather than discarding it.