Subtitles error with OMX Player on Pi 4 with RetroPie 4.6

Clyde

Hi folks,

I'm stuck with a strange problem on my brand new Pi 4 Rev. 1.2 with the official power supply and RetroPie 4.6 freshly installed with the official image file. I only re-mounted my roms directory (with scraped videos from Selphs's Scraper and SkySkraper) into its rightful place of the new installation and copied some overlay files over from the old installation. Most of the ES and RA configuration I set up newly to avoid problems using old config files.

The Problem: The game videos play nicely in the game list and the screensaver, but if I switch on Show Game Info On Screensaver in the video screensaver options, it will only display a black screen when the screensaver is active. The gamelist videos are unaffected by this phenomenon.

If I exit Emulation Station after that, the TTY displays this error above the login message, once for every video it could display before:

OMXPlayerSubtitles.h:86: bool OMXPlayerSubtitles::GetUseExternalSubtitles(): Assertion `m_open´ failed.

So it seems like OMX Player can't show the game info as Subtitles in the screensaver anymore. I couldn't find anything useful about this on the web or here in the forum. Any ideas?

Thanks
Clyde

mitu

On the Pi 4, with the new GPU drivers, omxplayer doesn't support subtitles - https://github.com/popcornmix/omxplayer/commit/f543a0d0e707ab56415f17b0ca6d397394ee8b63. Maybe the omxplayer version present in Raspbian is not sync-ed up to the latest version - what version of omxplayer do you have installed ?

Clyde

It's the version that comes with RetroPie 4.6:

$ omxplayer --version
omxplayer - Commandline multimedia player for the Raspberry Pi
        Build date: Thu, 01 Aug 2019 12:50:43 +0000
        Version   : f543a0d [master]
        Repository: https://github.com/popcornmix/omxplayer.git

$ apt show omxplayer 
Package: omxplayer
Version: 20190723+gitf543a0d-1
Priority: optional
Section: video
Maintainer: Serge Schneider <serge@raspberrypi.org>
Installed-Size: 633 kB
Depends: libasound2 (>= 1.0.16), libavcodec58 (>= 7:4.0), libavformat58 (>= 7:4.1), libavutil56 (>= 7:4.0), libc6 (>= 2.28), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.9.14), libfreetype6 (>= 2.2.1), libgcc1 (>= 1:3.5), libpcre3, libstdc++6 (>= 5.2), libswresample3 (>= 7:4.0), zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), ca-certificates, dbus
Homepage: https://github.com/popcornmix/omxplayer
Download-Size: 145 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian buster/main armhf Packages
Description: Command line media player for Raspberry Pi
 .
 It plays all media files supported by the Raspberry Pi
 hardware. Supports subtitles.

mitu

OK, so that's the latest version. Disable subtitles if you're using omxplayer, or switch to the VLC built-in video player.

Clyde

That's unfortunate, but there's nothing to be done at the moment, so I'll have to ponder about the two options. I really liked the game info in the screensaver if an unknown game catched my eye from afar, but I also didn't like the non-accelerated videos without OMX on my Pi 3 with RP 4.5.

Does VLC have hardware acceleration on the Pi 4 yet? I remember reading somewhere approx. a year ago that it was planned for the then available Pi models on Raspbian Stretch.

mitu

@Clyde said in Subtitles error with OMX Player on Pi 4 with RetroPie 4.6:

Does VLC have hardware acceleration on the Pi 4 yet? I remember reading somewhere approx. a year ago that it was planned for the then available Pi models on Raspbian Stretch.

It has, for both Pi3 and Pi4 models.

Clyde

@mitu Then I'll try which I do prefer, thanks! Two more questions, does VLC have HA "just like that" or do I have to activate it somehow? And does OMX have any advantages left over VLC?

mitu

@Clyde said in Subtitles error with OMX Player on Pi 4 with RetroPie 4.6:

Two more questions, does VLC have HA "just like that" or do I have to activate it somehow?

No, hardware acceleration is used by default.

And does OMX have any advantages left over VLC?

Yes, it's still faster than VLC with HW acceleration in EmulationStation.