Low volume on videos with OMX+PCM

BinaryMessiah

I am using a Picade and for some reason, videos only play audio when using OMX acceleration, however, the volume on these videos is incredibly low. If I turn the ES volume up to 100% it's still a fairly low volume, but the games are incredibly loud. I spent four hours searching around and couldn't find a complete answer on how to adjust the OMX volume for if it's even possible.

Pi Model or other hardware: Pi 4
Power Supply used: Canakit 3.5A
RetroPie Version Used: 4.7.19
Built From: Pre made SD Image on RetroPie website using the Pi imager

mitu

What is your setting for OMX Player Audio Device ?

BinaryMessiah

@mitu said in Low volume on videos with OMX+PCM:

What is your setting for OMX Player Audio Device ?

ALSA. This was instructed for use of the Picade Hat.

mitu

For ALSA, I think omxplayer's volume is not calculated correctly. Normally on the Pi this can be worked around by choosing explicitly local or hdmi, but in your case the audio is done via the GPIO (using I2S), so those options are not available.
My advice is to use the built-in (VLC based) video player and the volume control should be similar (ES and in-games). Note that VLC has also HW accelerated decoding for videos (similar to omxplayer) so the difference in performance between the 2 options on a Pi4 is barely noticeable.

BinaryMessiah

@mitu Yeah not using OMX leaves me with no sound in the video snaps. It’s super annoying. I’ve also spent ages researching that issue and can’t find a solution. So it’s either low audio or no audio right now for the video snaps.

mitu

@binarymessiah said in Low volume on videos with OMX+PCM:

Yeah not using OMX leaves me with no sound in the video snaps

That means the vlc built-in video player doesn't have the right audio settings. I remember now a while back a similar topic with the audio output from the Picade, the issue was that the I2S card doesn't have a volume control exposed to ALSA, so the volume slider has little effect.

Does alsamixer show any volume control for your card ? I assume that the configuration for the Picade has disabled the on-board audio, otherwise in-game sound wouldn't have worked.