X3Photo Gallery Forums

Hello, folks,

In the past I have posted questions about how to do things that X3 was never designed to do, and in many cases incapable of doing (sorry, Karl), and quite possibly it is liewise impossible too to do what I am asking below  :upside_down:.

I realize that X3's main purpose is for images, but with the added benefit of being capable of displaying videos in various ways.  On my varios X3 websites, I have a few galleries that display videos using 2 different methods, depending on the gallery: either

embedded in the Content tab using <video>; or
natively in X3 from the gallery's Gallery page.

My preferred method is #2, where I have the gallery use the Justified layout with a Wide gallery width, and then I have 2 items for each video:

1. the video itself, which I hide; and
2. an image that when the user clicks on it, it plays that hidden video.

Associated with that above image, in the link section, I have a pointer to that hidden video, like this:
So when a user clicks on any image in that Justified gallery, rather than the actual image being displayed by X3 in a popup, instead the hidden MP4 video is played (by way of the _self option).

As an asside, and unrelated to the questions in this post, for those galleries I also choose to add the following to those relevant galleries' CSS:
This works beautifully, except in some galleries I need those MP4 videos to loop, but unfortunately I have not been able to find how to loop them (if it's even possible).

So for now, I have been using method #1 (in the Content tab), because within the <video> tag I can use loop option, as an example:
The problem with using this embedded method, is the layout of the items in the gallery's Content page.  I've tried various different methods, including for example:
But I wish for the layout of the items, when using the embedded <video> method in the gallery's Content page, to look exactly like it would when using a gallery with the Justified layout.

So my questions are:

1. Does anyone know if it is possible to loop an MP4 video in the URL, similar to the filename.mp4?autoplay parameter?
2. Is there a way to embed items in a gallery's Content page & have those items display & react exactly like if they were in an X3 gallery using the Justified layout?

Thanks in advance & have a great day.

Regards,
John 

A sorta work-around that I've been using, and I use an example of a 2-second-long very-low-res animated GIF that I converted to MP4 and then upscaled to 1080p, is to take that MP4 file & duplicate it 450 times & merge them, which gives me a 15 minute MP4 file  :relaxed:.  The 2-second-long upscaled 1080p MP4 is 1.2 MB, but the resulting 15-minute-long MP4 is 54-MB long!

Another short 42-second-long MP4 is a whopping 341-MB in size, but if I try to duplicate that video 21 times to get a video that's about 15-minutes-long, the resulting file would be more than 7-GB in size  :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:.

Converting those MP4s to WEBMs is an option in order to reduce their filesizes, but they're still huge.  Hence me trying to find a way (if possible) to have those videos repeat/loop by passing a parameter in their respective URLs.

No problem.  I figured that was the case, but thought I would ask anyway, to be sure.

Thanks, and have a great day.