Are there guidelines for video snaps encoding, size and type?

raspnoobie

Trying to figure out what is the expected format for video snaps. Using retropie 4.6 on a Pi4

Some works, some does not work; got them from different scraper sites, so I would like to know if there are specific size, encoding and other settings to actually have the videos to play correctly in emulationstation.

So far I can see that MP4 is the format used, as encoding seems that you need H264 at 30 fps with 640x480 as size; while for audio it is MPEG Audio layer 1/2 stereo at 24KHz.
Is this all that is needed? I can re-encode videos to resize them and use the appropriate codec, but since I have hundreds of videos I would like them all in the same format for sake of consistency.

Clyde

I don't think there are any "standard" settings for video snaps. They tend to differ vastly between games, systems, and scraping sources.

So I would say, feel free to re-encode them to your liking (or don't, since re-encoding won't improve bad ones much, but can worsen even the better ones).

That said, there's one thing to consider with videos for Retropie: its hardware-accelerated OMX Player won't play videos with YUV 4:4:4 chroma subsampling. You'll have to use 4:2:0 instead. There are scripts available to batch convert any 4:4:4 videos to 4:2:0 (and much more, in case of the second link).

raspnoobie

Thanks for the reply. So it does not matter much if I make them 320x240 or 640x480 or what else, as long as they are 4:2:0 YUV. I will definitely use the script, thanks!

DTEAM

This post is deleted!