Another video player you can use with the Raspberry Pi is hello_video.  This player is based on example video playback code shipped with the Raspberry Pi so it doesn't have many features but is very fast at looping and playing videos.

One big limitation with hello_video is that it does not support playing sound from videos.

Another limitation of hello_video is that it requires videos to be in a raw H.264 stream format.  You can't give hello_video a .avi, .mov, etc. file!  However it's straightforward to convert a video into the format required by hello_video using the free ffmpeg tool.

To convert a video with ffmpeg, first download and install ffmpeg for your platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux are supported).  ffmpeg is a command line tool so you'll need to open a terminal on your computer and navigate to the directory that contains your video.  Then run a command like:

Where input_file.avi is the name of your video to convert (don't worry ffmpeg supports almost all video formats, so you can send it a .avi, .mov, .mkv, .mp4, m4v, etc.) and output_file.h264 is the name of the output file.  Make sure to keep the .h264 extension on the output file as it's required when using hello_video with video looper.

After ffmpeg finishes running (usually the operation is quite fast since it's just extracting the H.264 stream) copy the output .h264 file to a USB drive, make sure video looper is configured to use hello_video, and try playing the video.  You should see great video playback with no delay during looping.

hello_video Version

Also like omxplayer, the version of hello_video used by video looper is a special version forked from the original code.  This fork was made to turn hello_video into an application that can be installed separate from all the other example code, and to add a simple loop option to the program.  Don't worry about the details of this forked version unless you want to dive deeper into the source code--the install script for video looper will take care of everything!