No audio when using OMXPlayer for previews, but without is really slow

sad_muso

Recently (it seems to be since I moved my scraped media to ROMS which is on my external SSD drive but that may be a coincidence), the video previews are VERY slow to load (around 30 seconds). If I use OMXPlayer then I get instance, super smooth video but no audio. I've tried searching around for the same issue but have so far not found anything of use. Any ideas?

Details
Pi Model: 4 B 4GB
Power Supply: LABISTS Raspberry Pi 4 5.1V 3A
RetroPie Version: 4.6
Built From: RetroPie website image (md5: 9154d998cba5219ddf23de46d8845f6c)
USB Devices connected: 2.0: Wired keyboard / Plugable USB Bluetooth 4.0 adapter, 3.0: External SSD drive
Controller used: 8bitdo SFC30 / 8bitdo Lite
Error messages received: None

sad_muso

@sad_muso I should add that whenever I check the audio volume in the ES menu it's set to 0% but games have audio fine

Clyde

@sad_muso said in No audio when using OMXPlayer for previews, but without is really slow:

@sad_muso I should add that whenever I check the audio volume in the ES menu it's set to 0% but games have audio fine

See this thread about that.

sad_muso

I read this and tried a few things last night but no matter what I do I can't get sound to stick at 100% or video preview audio to play (only when OMXPlayer is off and video takes ages to load). I'm connected to TV via the HDMI port that passes audio, and in game audio works no problem

Clyde

I hear you, I had a similar problem myself (combined with complete system freezes when I applied some of the workarounds) and "fixed" it for now by re-installing from the official image that fortunately hadn't been updated to the new audio system yet – I cherish it like gold now. 😍

I plan to test updating the system packages from time to time after doing a full backup each time (I've semi-automated backups via network by rsync & ssh), and revert to the old state if the problem persists and the workarounds still don't work for me.

Maybe this is an option for you, otherwise you could search the forum for failed to find mixer elements, an error that is connected to the current audio problems.

Clyde

@sad_muso said in No audio when using OMXPlayer for previews, but without is really slow:

I read this and tried a few things last night

By the way, what were those few things exactly? I recently found a final solution for my problem.

sad_muso

@Clyde Nice one, thanks for the info. I just tried all of the various audio device settings (HDMI/Local/etc etc) and none worked. Looks like your solution when resulted to using the 3.5 jack, but I'm trying to get it working via HDMI.

Thus backing up sounds like a great idea. I'm about to take my first backup and I'm undecided about literally taking the entire image as a whole or just the relevant folders I'd need in order to restore my setup. In hindsight it'd probably make more sense to back everything up in its entirety for rollback purposes as you say.

Clyde

Cloning the whole sd card as an image it the easiest way and OS independant, but takes the longest time and the most space. Doing it file-wise differentially or incrementially is much more time and space efficient, but requires the ability to read Linux ext4 partitons, which Windows and MacOS surprisingly can't do ootb to this day, although all ext file systems have been Open Source ever since.

So, for a full file-based backup you're left with three options: image-based, or file based via Linux or third-party drivers for your non-Linux OS. (My apologies to all BSD users or other OS' with native ext support I may have missed.)

I'm in the fortunate position to have Linux as my main OS since the end of 2006 and that I had already a working ssh-based backup setup for all of my other machines when I started with Retropie. So, if you are so bold to dive into that, I would be happy to give some directions. If not, I wish you the best on the way that fits your requirements the best.

But then again, fixing your sound may be enough Linux tinkering for you right now … 🤓

sad_muso

@Clyde Thanks - managed to create an image backup so I'm happy now :)

But unfortunately I still haven't resolved this audio issue; do you have any pointers? From memory I don't think I've ever used OMXPlayer for video previous in the past, but as of recently if I don't use it then videos take ageeeees to load, so I have to use it, it would seem. But I can't for the life of me figure out why the audio won't work! As mentioned before, I'm trying to get this working through HDMI.