Emulatio Station crashes

[shadyaw]

Hi everyone, I’m having an issue with emulation station, I’ll try to explain myself as best as I can.

Issue: Emulation station crashes after exactly 36 entering/exiting game with video preview (it’s not a joke)

Configuration:
Raspberry Pi4 Model B – 2GB
Micro SD Samsung EVO 128GB formatted with SD Card Formatter
Good HDMI cable (tested)
Labists AC 5.1V – 3A adapter
Image: retropie-buster-4.7.1-rpi4_400 from https://retropie.org.uk/ mounted with Win32DiskImager

Changes to config.txt:
hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=16
to force 1080p resolution

Changes to raspi-config (I don’t think it can interfer):
Enabled SSH
Removed Overscan

Changes to Retroarch (I don’t think it can interfer):
Appereance – Lock menu…… OFF
Bilinear Filter ON
On screen notification OFF
Configured correctly 2 USB controller
Chosen lr-fbneo as Arcade emulator
Removed R2 input on Mame to open ongame settings menu
Changed emulator for NES to lr-quicknes
Disabled Run Command
Core remap for MegaDrive
Core remap for PCEngine
Core ovveride for PSX (disabled vibration / sync to exact content framerate ON / audio output ALSTHREAD / video output GLCORE)
Removed Retropie menu

Issue in details:
Emulation station crashes after exactly 36 entering/exiting game with video preview, if the video preview is not available the launch has not to be conuted. Exiting the 36th game the preview video is on screen and all the rest of the screen is black. After some second appears the written repeatedly scrolling DRM_IOCTL_MODE_CREATE_DUMB failed: Cannot allocate memory Failed to create scanout resource and after some other second of scrolling appears the Emulation Station Crashed! alert.

Gamelist view style: video
Omxplayer: ON
Theme: Comic Book
Video scraped with ScreenScraper W10 executable and transferred to RPi4

Solution tried not working:
Change theme to carbon
Scraped normalized videos (30fps/24hz)
Tried from the beginning with a fresh installation
Tried this solution found on the web:
https://acavalin.com/p/raspberrypi_server#videosett

Solution 1 tried working (tested with 4 hours and houndreds of entering/exiting game):
Gamelist view style: basic
Omxplayer: ON (but not operative with basic gamelist view style)

Solution 2 tried working (tested with 4 hours and houndreds of entering/exiting game)::
Gamelist view style: video
Omxplayer: OFF

Conclusion: the OMX player affect this issue (tell me if I’m wrong)

So, what’s the matter…. First of all…. WHY????? Then, i’d like to have the video preview on gamelist and with Omxplayer disabled some video in Arcade and Mame sections in preview play sound but not the video (ugly) and i found it why, it depends on differents codec profile (4:4:4 seems to be not completely supported).

Hope than someone could have some suggestion and that my post could be useful to someone else.

Thank you everyone.

[dankcushions]

@shadyaw thanks for the thorough investigation! it sounds like a memory leak with the OMX player. it seems to slowly consume video memory and not clean up after itself. can you try it with a different gpu_mem? the default on pi4 is gpu_mem=76 so please try adding
gpu_mem=128
in /boot/config.txt

i guess it will still crash, but after ~54 tries instead!

yep, after more research it seems this is a known issue: https://github.com/popcornmix/omxplayer/issues/782

you can raise gpu_mem to defer the issue but it will always crash eventually. i wouldn't raise it more than 256MB as that takes away memory from other tasks (3d doesn't use this reservation, for example)

[shadyaw]

@dankcushions thank you for your suggestions and you're right. I've tried to change the gpu_mem but it still crash, just after a different number of exiting game.

So if there's no solution I tried a workaround, hope this could be useful to someone else. Not using Omxplayer I had that problem with some video preview that got sound but not video. As I told you before I noticed the problem was the codec profile. The lucky thing is that on W10 the thumbnails of videos (associated to VLC program) that have this issue show the VLC icon instead of the screenshot preview of the video so they were easily recognizable. I used a program (WinXHDVideoConverterDeluxe) to convert manually those videos (they were more than one thousand but the program runs fast e you can upload and launch them all togheter and just wait, the only boring thing was to select them all manually). I replaced the codec profile corrected videos and everything works fine. I made two tests of almost 4 hours and exactly 250 exiting game (but who counts, I'm going crazy, I know) each one and the issue didn't occurred.

The only thing that I noticed is that shutting down the system it took about 20 seconds of black screen before starting the power off process, technically why? Did I stress to much the system? And what do you thing, should I expect another crash somehow or maybe I'm safe?

Thank you so much.