To answer your questions, @johnnyboy :

• I created a simple one-line script that plays the video on a loop and then added it to the PM2 management via pm2 start boo.sh and pm2 save. I disabled the Magic Mirror interface via pm2 stop MagicMirror and pm2 save. Now when then mirror boots, PM2 only watches over the script that calls the video playback.
• It’s not running the MagicMirror interface. No sense using all that overhead and calls to the weather API when it’s not being displayed.
• Caveat: the right display runs a video on loop under normal circumstances. Commenting out the one line that runs that video file and adding a line to play a different video file was trivial.
• Yes, VLC has the option to play a playlist or single file on a loop. You can find the command line options at VLC Help
• Not really. The file is already on the disk and sized to the resolution of the monitor. There’s no CPU or GPU intensive tasks and the on board hardware acceleration takes care of most of it.

@elitecybernet - Yeah, there is sound included in the video files. I turned it down as it got really distracting really quickly. The video is only like 3 minutes long and hearing the demonic laughter every 3 minutes got old. I think the left portrait was at 50% volume and the right was completely muted.

Now that Halloween is gone, I reverted the left & right displays to their original format. Because PM2 manages the scripts, it took all of 30 seconds per display. The hardest part was remembering their IP address so I could log in.

Couple questions…

How did you disable the interface to be able to show this on it’s own? Is it still playing on MM, but with everything else stopped?

Video File?.. where did you store it and what player did you use? What is the name of the first one?

Did the player give the loop option?

Is this very CPU intensive, seeing that you disabled the MM interface?
Thanks 😉

I edited a few of them together into a 3 minute video and set it to play on a loop.