Can I adjust volume when using OMXPlayer in EmulationStation?

pjft

For the original problem, in the latest versions of ES the volume slider should also affect OMX Player.

Wombat

@pjft
I'm on RetroPie 4.3 and ES V2.6.3RP. (Just updated ES, from source, through retropie's setup)
The only volume slider I see within ES is the system volume. When I move that up or down, it also affects the emulator volume. Turning the system volume down, so that the video previews are not blasting, makes the emulators nearly muted. What am I doing wrong?

pjft

@wombat Sorry, correct. You're not doing anything wrong. The OP's problem was just changing the OMX Player volume with the ES slider. That's what's been implemented.

Your problem seems to be closer now to the more recent question of "how to make it so that changing ES volume won't affect the emulators' volume as well". This is not as much an OMX Player problem as it is a wider ES one - even though I can see why controlling video previews' volume has now made that difference more apparent.

That isn't something I have an immediate solution for, though I could speculate that there would be a way to work that out in runcommand if needed, resetting the alsamixer(or similar) volume before launching an emulator.

@cyperghost and @meleu : would you have any thoughts or considerations on this particular item?

At the moment, I - personally, in an extremely non-informed nor definite manner - feel that ES controlling the volume of the entire system makes sense, as it is useful for RetroPie when being used in cabinets or other devices for controlling everything, as well as keeping volume semi-consistent across the entire experience. That being said, if it is deemed that that isn't the intention, I'm positive it's easy to change that.

The only thing I can attempt to tackle, though, and for that I'd like your inputs on, is: is the volume with OMX Player louder or significantly louder to the one with VLC? If that's the case, I'm happy to tone down the OMX Player volume on its own, as that is certainly not the intention - ideally the volumes would be similar (bar any particular rounding/approximations).

If, however, the volume levels are similar enough across the different range of volumes - 1% to 100% - then that's down to the volume of the videos we're scraping. We could fictitiously tone down the overall video volume, but then I fear that people may end up commenting on the opposite - that videos are low and then the emulators are louder than they expect.

Let me know what your experience is, and thanks for flagging this.

Wombat

Thanks for looking into that, pjft!

I made a workaround for my issue. I ended up doing the following:

Increased alsamixer from 42 to 85 - Found in this thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/4777/very-low-volume-hdmi/3

That automatically increased my ES system volume from 77 to 95.

From there, I went into retroarch (select + "B" while in game) and changed that audio setting from 0.0 to 2.0. (This thread helped out: http://www.sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=1919 )

Success! Changing retroarch helped level out the volume with the video previews in the ES. Audio is even across the board. :)

Although it would've been nice to turn down ES volume solely, the above gave me the same results. Just a little more tinkering.

pjft

@Wombat Thanks for sharing, that's interesting to know.

If you still can check whether the volume of VLC and OMX Player are (significantly) different, do let me know, as that is not the intention.

Thanks, and glad to hear you're sorted for the time being!

jwcbronski

@pjft I can confirm that the OMX Players volume is much higher that that of the VLC. It's the reason why I don't use it.
Would be great if you could lower the OMX Players volume on it's own so that it matches the VLC Players volume.

pjft

@jwcbronski I see. Thanks for the heads up.

In that case, I'll look into it on my own videos and then see what can/should be done about it, to match VLC. I'm sure it's something related to the manual conversion from ES 1-100% volume scale and OMX's volume scale.

Thanks.

Wombat

@jwcbronski said in Can I adjust volume when using OMXPlayer in EmulationStation?:

@pjft I can confirm that the OMX Players volume is much higher that that of the VLC. It's the reason why I don't use it.
Would be great if you could lower the OMX Players volume on it's own so that it matches the VLC Players volume.

JWC, glad to know you have the problem as well.

Is there a way to use VLC to play the video previews rather than OMX? If so, will there be any issues with lag? If I run without using the OMX HW acceleration, my video previews are laggy/choppy.

pjft

@wombat when you disable OMX player hardware acceleration, you're effectively using VLC.

pjft

Hi all.

I spent some time this morning coming up with a better approximation based on plain observation as there's little documentation here.

I submitted a PR for it, so hopefully this should be improved shortly.

If anyone wants to take a stab at testing it, and is comfortable with compiling code (or using @meleu's script to install test branches) this is my dev branch, based on 2.6.3.

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/tree/OMX-Volume

You may also download a binary for the Pi 3 here:

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/0.1-OMX/emulationstation

Place it somewhere on your pi, exit the main ES, run chmod +x emulationstation and then ./emulationstation and see how it performs at the different volume levels, especially compared to VLC.

Would love to hear your impressions. Be mindful that different videos have different volumes, as well as different hardware systems (i.e. emulators), but hopefully this performs better.

Thanks.