Scheduling mplayer inside cron

Question

I'm trying to get mplayer to loop a couple of videos for a couple of hours at a specific time: Here's a sample of what cron should look like:

0 21 * * THU pkill mplayer; mplayer -loop 0 "/home/user/1.mp4" "/home/user/2.mp4" # Playlist 1

0 22 * * THU pkill mplayer; mplayer -loop 0 "/home/user/3.mp4" "/home/user/4.mp4" # Playlist 2

When the cron fires, the screen goes black and everything is jammed. I can't kill the process.

I noticed that if I take away the loop (and the pkill before it) the screen still goes black, but after some time - when the video ends, i reckon - i'm back in business.

Why can't I see the videos? Is cron "sandboxed"?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Solved it.

This issue happened because I was placing these cronjobs inside root's cron (and i'm not logged in as root). Doh.