Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi
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@fieldofcows, @Nismo: How/where are you scraping the videos and marquees from? Are you doing it manually from a website, or do you have a way to automate it?
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@mattrixk I wrote my own little tool scraping tool that looks in specific directories on my disk where I had pre-downloaded all metadata and related files including video and marquees.
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@mattrixk I use the method I posted here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6589/easy-way-to-add-video-and-marquees-tags-in-your-gamelist-for-video-support
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@BuZz thanks for answers, I have already do it, but don't work, maybe since few days only....
Is somebody have tested the install recently ?
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@Stef11 ok i found sorry for the inconvenients
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@fieldofcows, @Nismo: Thanks for the answers guys. I think I might hold off on the Video Preview for now. There are a few other things I want to get sorted first (I'm elbows deep in the guts of a new theme, and depending on what happens with ES in the coming weeks, it could go one way or another).
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@Nismo: I also wanted to say, I had a look at your OldRoom theme and it looks fantastic. It's probably the most unique ES theme I've seen. Even if you disregard the video and imagine it with a screenshot in the TV instead, it's still completely different to most other themes out there. I love the fact that it looks like a real room with posters on the wall for games from each system, and the system and controllers sitting on the table. I like all the info you have on the System View too, with game boxes, stats and even a picture of the cartridge.
It's given me a bunch to think about for my next theme (well, the one after my next theme anyway), but now I'm worried that I'll just be copying what you've already done (but I suppose that's okay, considering MetaPixel is literally a ripoff of Pixel because I loved it but wanted metadata displayed).
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@mattrixk Don't worry about that, more diversity it's better, also my theme it's a port of oldroom theme from AM, but they only have 6 or 7 sytems, I modded the theme because not finished, I added more elements on each system, reflections that was not there, and created the rest of systems from scratch, now I have around 20 systems...
I already added a few more systems since the last build, but i was a little busy because christmas, I'll upload a new version soon, but i want to find time to open a new thread for the theme.
Also I want to upload some art to help people who like's the theme, like boxart, wheels ect.
Don't worry and do what you have in mind, i'm sure it will be wellcome.
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@fieldofcows Wow, congratulations on making this happen - I don't know how I hadn't heard of this before.
Just took the bait and updated my (stable) RetroPie build with Kids-mode to the main EmulationStation branch, and this works perfect - thanks for making this all happen! Thanks @Nismo as well for the oldroom theme!
Some thoughts and questions:
@fieldofcows- Will you be merging some of your changes (screensaver, for instance) back to the main RetroPie/EmulationStation repository? Or what is the plan in general?
- The main things I miss from @zigurana's Kids Mode mode were the Favorites and the option to jump to a Random game in my library, given that I had too many this was always an interesting way to surprise me. I've seen people mentioning Favorites in this thread in the past, but I don't recall seeing a mention to jumping to a Random game, so here's a (humble) suggestion for you to consider, should you find it interesting.
- I tried the oldroom theme you ported and it looks great overall. A few drawbacks I found, given that I have a 1080p screen but used the latest version you shared, which is a 720p version (unsure if related), is that just like @fieldofcows I cannot see the scanlines. It just looks awfully fuzzy. Not a big deal, especially if that's the goal, but I thought you were going for actual scanlines. Will try a 1080p version in the future and see if it makes a difference.
- Other than that, it's a really cool theme. There are a few systems I have that are missing, but I'll wait patiently for them. :)
Thanks all, really. This is exactly what I was looking for, having attempted to dabble in the past with animated gifs with no success.
Have a great day!
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@pjft You can change the scanlines effect or even disable it, the files are inside oldroom/art/ folder, simply rename the scanlines effect that you prefer to scanlines.png, or if you don't want scanlines rename it to no-scanlines.
I think i explained this before in other post, but I don't remember.
And yes, my last upload was 720p because it's the best can handle Rpi at this moment.
Regards.
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@pjft said in Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi:
a (humble) suggestion for you to consider, should you find it interesting.
That is a good idea, and I've added it to the metadata design proposal doc that I have on the go. You can see (and comment on) the doc here.
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@mattrixk @pjft , I have already splitted the go-to-random feature out into a separate PR for @fieldofcows' Screensaver branch.
So if he has time to look at it, it might hitch a ride with that feature. -
@Zigurana Great to hear!
I'll hope to get back to the Kids features in the future, but right now my kids are yet too young to play, so it's not as short term a priority as the other ones. :)
Cheers!
EDIT:
By the way, 60fps videos struggle to render properly on my RPi3 - maybe there's a lot going on, or it's VLC, or the USB drive doesn't have enough speed to cope with the throughput (weird), but I find that 60fps videos will have a lot of artifacts and fail to render correctly, whereas 30fps work like a charm.
Just a note. Anyone else has the same experience?
I've converted mine to 30fps via Handbrake.
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@pjft AttractMode with MMAL can just about run 480p videos on the Pi. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but the ES video integration doesn't use hardware acceleration and therefore high quality videos will be slow (if they work at all).
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@robertybob thanks for the note.
Indeed, after a while of fiddling, I notice that my RPi3 starts to overheat quite quickly when watching these videos. It's weird though, as I can stream stuff from Kodi without it overheating, as well as playing files from the drive with higher resolution.
I wonder what makes it so that in emulationstation it's much more taxing on the CPU/GPU. Any ideas? Is it VLC?
I guess I'll have to install a heat sink.
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@pjft it doesn't use the RPI GPU for hardware video decoding like Kodi, so will use a lot more CPU.
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@BuZz Got it. Thanks for the explanation.
Edit: though a follow up question (which maybe @fieldofcows will be better equipped to answer given it's his implementation): is that an issue with the VLC/Video plugin we're using in ES (meaning that it could eventually be improved) or is it endemic to ES, meaning we're out of luck for the foreseeable future?
Cheers, thank you.
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@pjft It's something I've thought about in the past. There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to use the gpu for video rendering and vlc does support it. However I don't know if it's available for use outside X.
When I tried it many months ago with vlc and sdl it didn't seem to make any difference to the performance so I was either setting it up incorrectly or it wasn't supported. I'll try it again.
I guess for it to work we would have to let vlc render directly to the screen rather than through an ogl texture. This would mean we couldn't support alpha blending on top of videos when acceleration is used.
Does kodi use the hardware codec when X is not installed? If so then there is no reason why we can't use it.
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@fieldofcows Thanks for the reply.
I know that what I'm about to say will be technically incorrect, but since I don't know how exactly you measured "performance" (CPU usage, memory, cycles...?), I'll venture a comment here about it. :)
It's not that the videos don't render full speed and with good performance currently, it's just that it seems to be somewhat more taxing on the CPU and causes it to heat up quite quickly - in fact, after a couple full 30 secs videos, it'll usually be showing the temperature warning.
On VLC and X, I don't have X installed to the best of my knowledge - at least not explicitly, only if it's a dependency on VLC/Kodi. It works perfectly fine there (unsure if it's GPU accelerated, though). But, as I said, I usually stream and view local 720p and 1080p videos there with no problem whatsoever, so I guess that's my benchmark.
I personally don't have a problem losing transparencies/alpha blending on top of the video, if we get better performance and lower temperatures.
Could it be the rendering via a texture that's taxing the CPU so much?
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@fieldofcows yes. Don't need X. Jessie shipped libs probably don't have support. Newer ffmpeg needed etc.
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