Most scraped MAME videos won't play

neurocrash

I found this post indicating that scraped videos are not necessarily in a format that is playable on RetroPie. I am attempting to conform my installation to the prerequisites and run the commands listed to convert the videos.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/15764

Impman66

Take a look at this;
Convert Videos
It's easy to do, I am pretty much a novice, when it comes to Linux and Pi programming, but found with this it was pretty straight forward.
Also check your other settings, like the Theme supports videos. I had the same issue as you, sound but no image. following the guide did the trick for me, hope it does it for you.
You may also have to turn off the OMX hardware acceleration in Other settings too, as some vids don't run with it on.

Clyde

@Impman66 said in Most scraped MAME videos won't play:

You may also have to turn off the OMX hardware acceleration in Other settings too, as some vids don't run with it on.

That is actually an easy way to check if it is the typical problem of videos with the "wrong" colour space 4:4:4 which the OMX player can't play, but VLC can (which is used when OMX is switched off). So, if those videos play with OMX off, it's very likely that this is the problem.

For OMX to play those videos, they have to be converted to 4:2:0 instead, e.g. with the script that @Impman66 linked to.

muldjord

The newest version of Skyscraper also allows you to convert videos on-the-fly. It's documented here.

neurocrash

@muldjord Thank you!!! If my current batch conversion doesn't work, I'll definitely be adjusting these settings.

neurocrash

@Clyde I couldn't but tell any difference between compatibility with omx on or off, so I've been very confused. I tried looking at resolution, frame rate, file size, etc but didn't think of the color settings. This is extremely helpful.

neurocrash

@Impman66 My problem was that my media was stored in the configs directory and one of the prerequisites of this conversion script is that the media is stored in the roms directory, and it took a few hours to move. The second problem was that I had massive quantities of old scraped videos that were no longer needed, but for whatever reason the vacuum function would not remove them or I misunderstand its purpose. It was going to take like 5 days to convert all the videos :o soooo, I had to delete that media and scrape the smaller set that I am actually interested in, recreate the game list, and now convert, which may be finished tomorrow. It just took me several days to find the conversion script thread since I was using the wrong search terms. I'm quite glad there is a solution and appreciate that the author created the script and gui.

morenr1

Other tool that can convert videos on-the-fly is ARRM. You can find it in this post

neurocrash

@Impman66 A side effect of having moved the media and running this script is that all my favorites and "last played" disappeared.

I found that this was due to the gamelist.xml files being reset after changing that Skyscraper media location setting and scraping again.
I was able to use a backup for MAME at least, which worked after doing a search and replace for:

/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/mame-libretro/

to

./media/

Once I get my favorites selected on the other platforms, hopefully I can just play for a while.

Thanks!

Clyde

@neurocrash said in Most scraped MAME videos won't play:

Once I get my favorites selected on the other platforms, hopefully I can just play for a while.

Yeah, we all had this dream in our younger days. 😉

Impman66

@neurocrash said in Most scraped MAME videos won't play:

@Impman66 A side effect of having moved the media and running this script is that all my favorites and "last played" disappeared.

I found that this was due to the gamelist.xml files being reset after changing that Skyscraper media location setting and scraping again.
I was able to use a backup for MAME at least, which worked after doing a search and replace for:

/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/mame-libretro/

to

./media/

Once I get my favorites selected on the other platforms, hopefully I can just play for a while.

Thanks!

Glad to see it is working now. With the Stelph scraper that puts the scraped artwork in a different location too, which is a pain in the butt.

Clyde

An easy way to replace the artwork location in the gamelist.xml with another / new one is the sed command (stream editor). This example changes the video directory from the relative path ./media/videos/ to the absolute path /mnt/artwork/videos/:

cp gamelist.xml gamelist.xml.backup    # make a backup in case something goes wrong
sed -i 's#<video>./media/#<video>/mnt/artwork/#g' gamelist.xml

The part in single quotes does the actual sed-magic:
s(earch)#[old string]#[new string]#g(lobally, i.e. all occurences)

This works for every other path, just change <video> to <image>, <marquee> etc. Omitting the artwork tag before the path will change any occurence in the file, e.g. if the whole artwork is located in another place.

Execute man sed in the command line to get the manpage (manual page) of this tool, or search the web for myriads of examples.