Video Preview in EmulationStation
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@buzzyc I started testing on a pi-zero and found the same as you today. The Zero may not be powerful enough to handle playback.
@fieldofcows imagining there might be some people that share their gamelists between a pi-zero and a pi2/3 do you think it would be reasonable to create pi-zero specific themes that set <delay> for the md_video property to a high enough number (like a few hours) so that video just doesn't start playing on the zero? I have been experimenting with that this evening and it seems like it helps with performance in ES on the zero when using themes with gamelists that have the video property.
Alternatively, would it be possible to add a setting to the md_video property to allow a theme to not render video at all? I know it sounds odd as the intent is to play video but it might help with creating pi-zero specific themes for people that have video metadata in their gamelists.
I am thinking through it still but wanted to see what you thought. Thank you for any help.
My RetroPie Themes:
Art Book https://github.com/anthonycaccese/es-theme-art-book
Art Book Next https://github.com/anthonycaccese/art-book-next-retropie
TFT https://github.com/anthonycaccese/es-theme-tft -
It's good to hear at least I wasn't alone in the issue. I was going to ask on your YouTube video RE: CRT if you had been testing that on your zero or not.
One thing I did note was it doesn't appear to be the video itself causing the slowdown. I tested with both the CRT and oldroom theme, and the simple act of adding <video> tag in the gamelist without even having a path pointing to something caused slowdown, even with the static.mp4 video disabled too.
It's most notable when you choose the system. That without the <video> tag loads quite quickly, whilst the <video> tag system (NES in this case) has a noticeable delay before it goes into gameslist view.
Something additional too, I notice that if there is no <video> tag, the <marquee> tag doesn't appear to work. Is that by design? I couldn't seem to make it work no matter how I edited the themes. I was hoping that in the oldroom theme for instance the <image> could be the screenshot and the <marquee> the boxart.
I tried searching if there were other image related tags I could use but came up empty, unless I can just make any <md_imagesomething> and add the extra=true suffix?
Again, thanks for all the help and I am loving both the video theme on my Debian build and all the themes in this thread :)
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@buzzyc I'll try to explain to you, there are 4 views right now:
- system view
- basic view
- detailed view
- video view
If there is not video tag, then the video view (that is the only with marquees support) is not loaded, so that is because marquees doesn't work without video tag.
I was speaking with @fieldofcows about adding marquees support to detailed view, and I suposse it's in his "to do" list, but he is very busy doing a lot of other things.
About the pi zero gamelist slowdown problem, maybe when he finish his new metadata management maybe it can be solved, because the intention it's to manage gamelists faster, we need to wait the release and help him to test it.
Regards.
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@Nismo
Maybe a dumb question, but I cant find it in this monster thread, what exactly is a marquee element the theme?
Is it another type of image element that is alway placed on top of all other elements?
Could you maybe show me an example image? -
@Zigurana Marquee it's just another image for one specific game that can be displayed at same time than md_image.
Initially it was created to display marquees in mame theme, displaying an arcade machine with the md_image in the arcade monitor and the marquee on top.
But for themers it can be used to display any image apart from md_image.
Here's an example about initially created for arcade themes (mame):
Here I use it marquee to display wheel art:
I hope this can help you to understand better.
Regards.
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@fieldofcows Long time without posting anything about the theme so here you have a little preview of amiga system. (I used megadrive system to test it).
I need to change the gb, gbc and gba cartridges for 3d box images.
I also fixed the gameboy with 4 buttons... lol
I need help to find a good quality image about somebody with a gameboy color in his hands, please somebody can help me?
My mistake gba is not in the video but is finished too.
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@buzzyc I tried out a few performance ideas for my Pi-Zero last night. Sadly no luck on the videos themselves playing at reasonable framerate so I had to go the other route and ended up building a Zero specific theme that essentially hides the video element for now for Pi-Zero specific theme
Wondering if you would be up to trying it out on your end as well and see if it at least helps with the performance on a Zero? Link here for now: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hnwbkn7d6akye4x/crt-zero.zip?dl=0
Essentially I set the <delay> element to a high enough amount of seconds to avoid video from being loaded on the Zero and then positioned the video element off of the screen (<pos>1 1</pos>).
If that works on your end it could be the way to go for accounting for gamelists that have video when used on the Pi-Zero (for not at least)
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@fieldofcows I've seen this : "Render videos behind 'extra' images with transparency to allow framing of videos" and was thinking about a possible "blend mode" for the images(add,multiply,etc) that would make me even happier. Do you think that could be possible in the future?
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@Nismo said in Video Preview in EmulationStation:
I need help to find a good quality image about somebody with a gameboy color in his hands, please somebody can help me?
Will this work?
Edit: The original is here.
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@mediamogul Thank you very much.
I'll take a look, but is cutted on the top, and i'm affraid that the image quality it's about the same than the image i have.
Do you have one not cutted on the top? I don't mind if the bottom is cutted.
Regards.
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@Nismo said in Video Preview in EmulationStation:
Do you have one not cutted on the top?
I'm afraid not. I looked through quite a few, but I'll continue to keep my eyes open for one. I'm a big fan of this theme. It's really coming together beautifully. I'm sorry if this has been asked a million times before, but are you planning to add all the systems over time?
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@mediamogul I'm planning to add almost the most popular systems at this moment, I don't know how many systems I'll add in the future.
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@Nismo said in Video Preview in EmulationStation:
I don't know how many systems I'll add in the future.
Well, I love your inventiveness so far. I look forward to seeing your creative solutions to systems like VirtualBoy and Game&Watch if you ever get around to them. Also, I had an idea for your GameBoy Color image. The one I posted was just the screen grab that YouTube uses for
. I imagine that somewhere in that video, or one similar to it, that you might find an appropriately framed image you could better make use of. -
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C'est Magnifique!
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@fieldofcows That's perfect!!!!! I was looking for one like that but didn't find anything.
Absolutely amazing!! thank you very much!!!
@mediamogul I'll take a look what can I do with VirtualBoy and Game&Watch.
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@fieldofcows It's this issue fixed on latest retropie build?
if you manually scrape a game inside ES menu, it deletes your video and marquees tags in gamelist.xml.
And please, can you make a pull request to have the no splashscreen option on the latest build?, this is the only thing because i don't try to compile the latest build for windows and it's because I'm still using your old emulationstation fork.
I manually made the changes in the source code for the subfolders fix, but would be very nice for me to compile the latest ES version with all the metadata and WSOD updates coming...
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@Nismo [some more for reference] (http://imgur.com/gallery/QHTf2) (although you needto cut them out and adjust the perspective a bit)
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@Zigurana Thank you! I love the interest shown by mates in this forum, simply amazing.
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@Nismo said in Video Preview in EmulationStation:
@fieldofcows It's this issue fixed on latest retropie build?
if you manually scrape a game inside ES menu, it deletes your video and marquees tags in gamelist.xml.
The built-in scraper has several known issues, and I don't think @fieldofcows has touched it at all (but I might be wrong). The reason why the ES scraper deletes the new tags is because it doesn't know they are supposed to exist, since it's a newly added feature. It simply doesn't write them out.
However, I also don't think that the scraper is a high priority right now. Either he, or I, or someone will probably be implementing the improvements discussed in the metadata thread (https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6985/metadata-improvements-in-emulationstation). Once that is implemented, no existing scraper will work, so either a new scraper will need to be written, or an existing scraper (i.e. @sselph or @screech 's) can be ported to work within ES.
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