Repeat beamer presentation automatically

Question

I have a beamer presentation which should run automatically on its own during an exhibition. I already added \transduration{5}\transblindshorizontal to show the next slide automatically after 5 seconds, but I still need to figure out how to jump back to the very first slide after the very last slide has been shown. I can't find anything in the beamer manual.

PS: I'm not looking for anything like \againframe. The whole presentation should repeat itself over and over again for almost a whole day.

Answer 1

As one option, outside of LaTeX, you could set up Adobe Reader to do this. Under Preferences -> Full Screen, select the Loop after last page option:

Answer 2

Because of Werner's answer I now found the comp.text.tex post https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.text.tex/kYnAVKbuq50/vZZFuBK1mlMJ which provides the following code. It uses PDF low-level commands to loop after the last page. This is basically the same as the viewer setting in Werner's answer, but part of the PDF. It works for me under Ubuntu Linux 11.04 with Adobe Reader 9.4.2. No idea if this is viewer dependent. At the very least the viewer must support some basic javascript.

Put the following in the preamble of the beamer document:

\hypersetup{pdfstartpage=1}
\pdfcatalog{
/AA <<
/WC <<
/S/JavaScript/JS (app.fs.loop=false;)
>>
>>
}
\pdfpageattr{
/AA <<
/O <<
/S/JavaScript/JS (app.fs.loop=true;)
>>
>>
}

An alterntive solution I figured by browsing other beamer questions is to use impressive to show the PDF file. Using the -w option the PDF is repeated and the transient time can be set using -a 5. However, this tool converts the PDF to an image which adds some small but ugly white frame at the lower and right site. Also I really prefer to stay with only PDF to keep things simple.