loopsmith

Find the longest seamlessly-loopable segment in a video.

Given a clip, loopsmith figures out the longest stretch you can pull out and play on repeat without a visible jump — the point where some later frame looks almost exactly like an earlier one, so playback can snap back to the start with no seam. Handy for turning B-roll, animations, or background footage into clean loops (looping wallpapers, GIFs, video backdrops, and so on).

How it works

The core of it is a single matrix multiply.

1. Sample every Nth frame, shrink each to a 160px thumbnail, convert to grayscale, and z-score normalize it (subtract the mean, divide by the standard deviation).
2. Stack the normalized frames into a matrix and multiply it by its own transpose. For z-scored vectors, each dot product (divided by the pixel count) is the normalized cross-correlation between two frames — a similarity score from -1 to 1 where 1 means "visually identical." So one mat @ mat.T produces the score for every pair of frames at once.
3. For each pair of frames, the gap between them is a candidate loop length. Among all pairs whose similarity clears a threshold, the one with the largest gap wins: those two near-identical frames are the in- and out-points of the longest seam-free loop.

Because the expensive step is one BLAS matmul, it stays quick even though it's effectively comparing every frame against every other frame.

Install

pip install loopsmith

From source, for development (includes the test deps):

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Needs Python 3.9+, OpenCV, and NumPy — the last two are pulled in automatically.

Usage (CLI)

# Analyze a single video
loopsmith clip.mp4

# Batch every .mp4/.mov in a directory
loopsmith ./footage/

# Loosen or tighten the similarity threshold (default 0.85)
loopsmith clip.mp4 --threshold 0.80

# Sample every 5th frame instead of every 3rd (faster, coarser)
loopsmith clip.mp4 --downsample 5

# Detailed report: top 10 loops by similarity and by length
loopsmith clip.mp4 --detail

# Find the best loop closest to a target length, in seconds
loopsmith clip.mp4 --detail --target-length 6

Batch mode prints the best loop per file as a table; --detail (single file) prints the top candidates plus a yes/no "is this clip loopable" verdict.

Usage (library)

from loopsmith import extract_frames, find_best_loop

rows, frame_indices, fps, total = extract_frames("clip.mp4", downsample=3)
loop = find_best_loop(rows, frame_indices, threshold=0.85)
if loop:
    start_frame, end_frame, ncc = loop
    seconds = (end_frame - start_frame) / fps
    print(f"Loop {start_frame}->{end_frame} ({seconds:.1f}s) at {ncc:.1%} similarity")

Other helpers: find_best_for_target() (the loop closest to a target duration), find_top_loops() (ranked candidates), and analyze_video() (a one-call summary dict).

Notes & limitations

• Visual only. It compares frames, not audio. A visually seamless loop can still have an audible seam — check the sound separately if that matters.
• Cut resolution. In/out points are accurate to within --downsample frames, since that's the sampling step. Lower it for tighter cuts at the cost of speed.
• Scales as O(N²) in sampled frames. It builds an N×N similarity matrix, so for long videos raise --downsample to keep time and memory in check.
• It reports, it doesn't cut. Output is frame indices / timestamps and similarity scores; trimming the actual clip (e.g. with ffmpeg) is up to you.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.