Video View For All Themes

fieldofcows

Another thought. Instead of checking version numbers we could use something like this:

<feature supported="video">
  [configuration if ES supports video]
</feature>

<feature supported="grid">
  [configuration if ES supports grid]
</feature>

Nismo

@fieldofcows Omg you are a genius, that's totally amazing...

Will that thing cause troubles with older versions of ES?

herb_fargus

@Nismo I agree, I think it makes more sense with all the forks...

fieldofcows

@Nismo said in Video View For All Themes:

@fieldofcows Omg you are a genius, that's totally amazing...

Will that thing cause troubles with older versions of ES?

No, it won't cause trouble with older versions. Ok, I'll make it so.

herb_fargus

As an aside at some point it might be good to add the theming docs for video view to the GitHub themes.md

Nismo

@fieldofcows Yes, I think that's better than the version thing because can be compatible between different forks and doesn't interfere with child icons.

Nismo

@fieldofcows I forgot to ask to you, will be that tag mandatory or optional if you make the commit?

I think it will be mandatory for backwards compatibility... but optional for non backwards compatibility.

hansolo77

I've been experiencing difficulties with various themes and the version of ES as well. For instance, I like the Kid-Friendly version of ES where I can set up favorites and also have a random game picked for me. The problem with that is there is no video support because it uses the older version of ES/xml. So to get video, I update to the latest source of ES. I lose the Kid-Friendly modifications, and gain the video capabilities. Personally, I'd rather get video, as the Kid-Friendly version isn't really all that beneficial since I don't have kids lol.

I would like to point out, in my experimenting I tried the latest carbon_with_video theme, and it didn't work right for me. When I went into a system that had videos (and a properly tagged gamelist.xml) the screen was all white except for the text, and a black box where the video/art should be. I'm hoping it was just a fluke, because I've been messing around with the ES versions. I'm in the process now (almost completed) of scraping all the videos for my games, then I can experiment more.

I mentioned this earlier in the other video preview thread. I think having multiple versions of the themes is really the only way to solve a lot of the headaches, until you roll out a new version of RetroPie completely, which comes with whatever latest version of ES you guys decide on using. That way somebody can go through the process in the ES-Themes scripts and see the breakdown: Carbon, Carbon_v4 (Kid-Friendly), Carbon (Video). When a theme is selected, have the script check the versions and then pop-up an alert saying a newer version of ES is required, and offer the option to automatically install it.

But I also agree with the first post... there should be versions of each theme that natively supports video, as that is the direction of the project and currently available in the latest version of ES.

Nismo

@hansolo77 I'm sure you doesn't have the correct version of ES for video.

can you hear video sound even if you can't see the video?

@hansolo77 said in Video View For All Themes:

When a theme is selected, have the script check the versions and then pop-up an alert saying a newer version of ES is required, and offer the option to automatically install it.

For this I think that every developer must include this option in their fork and I don't know if everybody will commit this. That's the problem with multiple forks.

P.D: I miss a private message option in this forum, @herb_fargus can't be possible to implement it in the forum?

Rookervik

@mattrixk I'm with you on updating things. Once I get something working, I hate to update and take the chance of screwing things up. I've had it happen far too many times. So I, also, have no intention of force-updating ES just to get a theme to work... that used to work fine on older versions.

@lilbud If you've done some theming tricks, a single update to the main.xml will apply to all systems. You shouldn't have to update every single system. But for anyone that has written all of the main theming aspects into the theme.xmls, then yeah, updating a theme can be very, very time-consuming.

I can get video previews ready, and even release it as a separate theme. But until RetroPie has a couple of releases under it's belt containing 'video preview-modded ES' as the main image download from the web page, I don't want to make video previews the main download for my themes. I'd hate to break peoples' systems that just wanted the new graphics on their old and trusty RetroPie setups.

Nismo

@Rookervik said in Video View For All Themes:

If you've done some theming tricks, a single update to the main.xml will apply to all systems. You shouldn't have to update every single system. But for anyone that has written all of the main theming aspects into the theme.xmls, then yeah, updating a theme can be very, very time-consuming.

That's my case, because not all systems has the same size of video window and not in the same place... and there are not tricks for that if you do a theme like mine...

hansolo77

@Nismo said in Video View For All Themes:

@hansolo77 I'm sure you doesn't have the correct version of ES for video.

can you hear video sound even if you can't see the video?

Yes, I can see and hear the video. But the aspect ratio is all wrong. I'll post a picture of it..

Actually, nevermind. I re-installed the latest version of ES from source, and then re-install the theme again. Now it's working. The only downside to this video-version of the Carbon theme is the lack of any of the extra details, like number plays and last time played. I guess that's just a limitation of what was included in the theme.

Zigurana

@fieldofcows said in Video View For All Themes:

Another thought. Instead of checking version numbers we could use something like this:
<feature supported="video">
  [configuration if ES supports video]
</feature>

<feature supported="grid">
  [configuration if ES supports grid]
</feature>

If you can point me to the commit that takes care of this on the ES side of things, I'll create the same for the kids-mode fork.
(I need to get back to that one in any case, smoothen out the last wrinkles.)

Nismo

@hansolo77 I didn't touch metadata, the theme is that way out of the box, almost the latest version from github is that theme. And is not a limitation the theme is made that way.

Sorry all for the offtopic.

Rookervik

@Nismo Ah yes I noticed that. You can't use <maxSize> on the videos. So you are forced to set their X and Y size. Making your themes a lot harder in that you have to research the console and figure out the aspect, and set the videos to that size for your theme. It would be much easier to allow maxSize and remove size. That way themers don't have to manually enter an exact size for the video. I really dislike forcing images (or movies) to a certain aspect. I'd rather they were restrained from getting too large but allowed to keep whatever aspect they are in.

mattrixk

@Rookervik said in Video View For All Themes:

I'd rather they were restrained from getting too large but allowed to keep whatever aspect they are in.

Hear hear!

Nismo

@Rookervik I was talking with @fieldofcows about that time ago, sometimes it's useful for some themes to restrict video size and sometimes not, and the function to show the image if no video doesn't respect the aspect, it's a known issue and he was working on that.

fieldofcows

@Nismo said in Video View For All Themes:

@Rookervik I was talking with @fieldofcows about that time ago, sometimes it's useful for some themes to restrict video size and sometimes not, and the function to show the image if no video doesn't respect the aspect, it's a known issue and he was working on that.

Was I? Haha! I can't remember. I've got such a huge list of ES tasks I want to complete and not enough time to work on them! It's a shame I have to work for a living :(

I did have code in there to maintain the aspect ratio but I took it out for the RetroPie PR in order to simplify the review/testing of what was a big change - I tried to keep the change as small as possible. It wouldn't be hard to put this back in.

Nismo

@fieldofcows Yes, don't worry and take your time.

Was here https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5823/looking-for-testers-for-es-video-preview-on-raspberry-pi/36

I remeber to speak about the maxsize on videos but i can't find the post.

mattrixk

@fieldofcows said in Video View For All Themes:

Another thought. Instead of checking version numbers we could use something like this:
<feature supported="video">
  [configuration if ES supports video]
</feature>

<feature supported="grid">
  [configuration if ES supports grid]
</feature>

Has anyone started working on this? I think it would be a great way to future proof the themes so we can build for the cool new stuff while still making the themes work on older versions of RetroPie.