Scraped Video Preview - Skipping / Freezing

[Trailjacker]

Searched a lot of keywords here and on google and only found issues of videos not playing at all.

I sselph scraped videos from screenscraper to my MAME and Atari 2600 sets to test this feature and have to say it's awesome !

The issue I am running is that many videos have lag/freeze/skip/discoloration which ruins the entire experience. Has anyone else run into this? I also notice a rare lightning bolt which I hadn't seen before until I added the videos but it's only on certain videos and not consistent even on those. I wouldn't think the pi3B would have any issues with a 1MB-12MB video file so am somewhat confused. I've even played PSX games with no lightning bolt so seems strange a tiny baby video would cause this unless it's an issue with the built in player?

[pjft]

@trailjacker You should enable OMX Player in the Other Settings, which is hardware accelerated.

Then, if the MAME videos don't work, you would do well in re-encoding them (any setting in Handbrake will do the trick), since some scraper sources have their videos encoded in a tricky format.

[Trailjacker]

Thank you for a super quick response!

I will check if OMX is enabled when I get home. I assumed it was enabled by default so hadn't checked that yet. I'm good with handbrake and was going to reencode too if only to save space but didn't want to do it until I knew it wasn't my setup.

My Atari 2600 videos aren't actually playing either so maybe they all just need proper conversion.

Thanks again

[felleg]

I'm about 90% confident Handbrake will be the solution, here. I had the same issue and this is the fix that worked.

[Trailjacker]

@felleg Thank you, I will definitely try that when I get home and check OMX.

[pjft]

If you go full on converting the videos, converting them all to 480x360@30fps will usually work well for both OMX and VLC which is the default. OMX is far more performant though.

[felleg]

@pjft said in Scraped Video Preview - Skipping / Freezing:

If you go full on converting the videos, converting them all to 480x360@30fps will usually work well for both OMX and VLC which is the default. OMX is far more performant though.

To complete this tip, if you used sselph's scraper to scrape your videos, there is actually a flag (-convert_videos) that will automatically convert the videos in this format if you already have Handbrake installed.

[hiulit]

@felleg Really? Nice! I'll try it, thanks!

[Trailjacker]

This post is deleted!

[Trailjacker]

I haven't had a chance to re-scrape the videos and convert. Both of my sd cards stopped being detected by both windows and the pi3, and when i took them out of my windows card reader slot and usb card reader they were both very hot and had what looked like a crack going through them. When I went to investigate the crack physically the cards both folded into two pieces where the crack was. Very strange and expensive coincidence, being that one card came from my cousin's pi and the other was just used the night before in a linux mint VM hosted on windows.

I'll update when my new EVO card comes in from Amazon Prime tomorrow.

[pjft]

@trailjacker Oh my, sorry to hear that.

Let us know how it goes.

[Trailjacker]

@pjft Staying up to date : Amazon lost my package >:-0 over the weekend so it finally got here today. I am updating and then will scrape and let you know.

[Trailjacker]

Scrape in progess. Should be done by the end of 2017 on the Pi 3 :)

[pjft]

Hopefully in time for Xmas at least :P

For a helpful tip, you might consider keeping your ROMs in a USB thumb drive, and scraping them via a laptop/desktop PC.

It's faster, and you'll spare the SD card slightly by not having so many read/write operations during the process. :)

[Trailjacker]

The -convert_videos seems to have fix any playback issues. Unfortunately that ran the temp of the Pi up the entire time so I will have to try the laptop idea next.

I appreciate the help with everything!

[Trailjacker]

One more question (or two )

If I get a 'hash not found' in the scraper, what's the easiest way to go back and grab it? For example Super Mario Bros 1 on NES wasn't found. If I use ES which is easy enough to go through the few missing roms, it won't add the videos. If I run the scraper again with another site ( do any besides ss give videos?) will it skip the ones that already exist or redownload them since it may be a different image/video? Or do I need to choose a different rom and assume the one I had was just a bad hash None of the mame roms are found using the command line using ss,adb but it finds it in the setup menu scraper which is weird. Any ideas on that?

Thanks

[pjft]

@trailjacker I personally don't know a lot about scrapers. I usually use sselph's scraper and then manually add videos on my own, though I'm using an old version of the scraper.

Sorry I'm not more helpful here - maybe a separate thread with that particular question may help?