[Theme] CRT

Keigan

@wiltur said in [New Theme] 'CRT' with support for Video Preview:

Nice job !
Is there a way to use a distant video ? (like http://domaine.tld/video.mp4 )

Sorry what is distant video? I can't open the link or download the file, error for me.

I think he meant linked/streamed video, that he can link via url rather than have it local.

I could be mistaken though

Dominus

I find the videos give me the temperature warning. Anyone else get this? Problem goes away when I plugged my fan in, but then I get the low voltage icon lol. Gonna have to figure something out here...

MWGemini

@Dominus You're the second person to report a temperature warning when playing videos (the other was @pjft in this thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5823/looking-for-testers-for-es-video-preview-on-raspberry-pi/58 ). @fieldofcows is looking into the issue, but neither he nor I have yet been quite able to reproduce it.

My guess is that it's some combination of a really close fitting case (no airflow), a manufacturing defect (some chips and boards might be of lower quality), or something unique to certain videos that is over-stressing the CPU.

pjft

@Dominus and @MWGemini

Thanks. I replied in the other thread.

480x360 at 30fps don't give me the temp warning, at least in my case. 320x240 are good as well.

Most old consoles would render at 320x240 or lower, so that should be good for the majority of videos.

What I found, however, is that the available videos to download at 320x240 at EmuMovies are low quality (unsure why that would be the case, as it's clearly more resolution than the SNES, NES, or most Arcade games from Mame and FBA, but that's how they were captured...) and the 640x480 ones are actually good quality, but when resized to 320x240 become super blurry, so it isn't a decent compromise.

For MAME videos, I found

http://www.progettosnaps.net/videosnaps/

To have the majority of videos at a decent resolution for us to use, most at 320x240 and super sharp.

EDIT: @Nismo I suspect by "distant" video he means "remote" video (i.e. from a web address, rather than a local path). It's likely a translation error. That would be cool, to some extent, I suppose.

Dominus

@pjft I think most of my videos are 480p. The ones on EmuMovies are lower quality because you need a membership to get the better ones. I got mine from other places though, or old torrents.

pjft

@Dominus Got it.

What I did in the same case was to use Handbrake (Mac) or an equivalent software to batch resize them to 480x360, or even 320x240. Those shouldn't overheat.

Let me know how it goes - even if you just run a simple experiment with a single video and see if it works.

I downloaded one video from YouTube for a dreamcast game, and it comes in 360p (480x360) so that's an easy way to get a video snap in that resolution and test it out.

abodi

@Dominus i did get the temp warning when scrolling through games for a long amount of time to make sure they were all working.

So videos are definitely adding to the load for sure

abodi

@MWGemini i get temperature warnings too if I sit there browsing through games for an extended period.

It can happen on any video of any system, exiting back to the systems menu makes the temp warning go away within seconds.

My videoed are the low quality ones from emumovies.

I'm using the official pi case with the lid off (no fan)

I never get temp warnings playing any games or even watching high quality videos in kodi.

My guess is it may be relating to the rapid loading of many different files.

Dominus

@abodi Do you have any heatsinks on your Pi? I don't have any on this one, and I was hoping that it would help.

Nismo

I will upload videos and art optimized for rpi.

Just need some help and testing because I don't have rpi.

Take a look here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5823/looking-for-testers-for-es-video-preview-on-raspberry-pi/81

Regards.

Linkseo

these all look great. thanks for the hard work on these. was wondering if any themes will be made to cater to a 4:3 ratio? they currently all seem to be for 16:9. when I install them they look squished on my 4:3 monitor :(

Dominus

http://pastebin.com/VVCbG4YK

There is a link to an updated Theme.xml (just replace the one in the root folder). I have no clue what I am doing, but I got the System Logos bigger, I updated the game list to a smaller font (I think), and longer area. And same with the description, I stretched it out a bit, and fixed the Last Played so you could see it all.

Hope that was okay?!? It's just a rough draft, and I haven't even tested it with Videos yet, but so far it looks okay. But if the OP @alphatoanant wants to make his own that's fine by me. I hope I didn't step on any toes here, just wanted to see if I could change it up a bit, and thought I'd share for those that might want something similar.

Nismo

@Dominus said in [New Theme] 'CRT' with support for Video Preview:

. And same with the description, I stretched it out a bit, and fixed the Last Played so you could see it all.

Yes, maybe it looks ok until you have videos and marquees...

@Linkseo said in [New Theme] 'CRT' with support for Video Preview:

these all look great. thanks for the hard work on these. was wondering if any themes will be made to cater to a 4:3 ratio? they currently all seem to be for 16:9. when I install them they look squished on my 4:3 monitor :(

It's very difficult to make a simple theme working for both 4:3 and 16:9.

I'll try to explain easy... characters for "players", "last time played", "developer", etc, etc...
If you are a theme developer, and you make the theme for 16:9 it's all ok. When you change to 4:3 all characters are on top of the others.

To solve this you need to place for example "developer", "atari" too far ago one from the other, that way you can see something like this to make it compatible with 4:3:

16:9:
Developer: --------------Atari

4:3:
Developer: Atari

If you make a theme for 16:9 screen you doesn't place the words so far away and then when in 4:3 you see some words in top of other words.

Linkseo

@Nismo Yes. Thats exactly what i get now on my 4:3 monitor. Letters on top of each other :(. No love for old school aspect ratio. Still great work

Dominus

@Nismo Oh I never knew that, I was wondering why it looked like it was only using a 4:3 ratio of the screen. I'll have to look into it a bit more.

caver01

@Nismo I second @Linkseo (and there are probably many others) regarding 4:3 displays. It seems many of the old die-hards building true retro systems using displays that match most of the original systems we are emulating are sometimes overlooked by theme builders. That said, we do have themes that work on both, so I am not really complaining as much as adding another voice to the 4:3 cause. Not everyone uses their home TV to run RetroPie.

abodi

@Dominus yes heatsinks installed

Nismo

@caver01 In a theme like mine, it's not possible to do it because it's a lot of hard work to make a 4:3 theme, but for this one, would be very ease to make 2 versions, one 4:3 and another one 16:9, only need to edit some values on main theme.xml file.

But it's a @alphatoanant decision, he's the creator of the theme.

Kischa

Wrong thread...sorry.

alphatoanant

I have been away on holiday and wasn't able to respond sooner

@abodi and @Dominus, I'll continue to tweak spacing and the size of the text list soon. I definitely still have work to do to make it more consistent across different resolutions and thanks to the windows build that @Nismo posted it will be easier to try resolution variations. I am prioritizing 1280x720 and 1920x1080 right now but please don't hesitate to send me any other variations that you are on (more on 4:3 ratio below)

And @Dominus, totally fine regarding tweaking the theme XML manually. I'll use your changes as the base for the text size changes. You are not stepping on any toes at all. I very much appreciate your help to me and the rest of the group here.

@Furluge, I am not sure I am going to add back in release date and genre yet. But I did try something out visually to see what I could change to accommodate it. See here: http://i.imgur.com/e6y0kIl.png
I had to reduce the description to 4 lines which I think could be ok. I am mainly trying to keep it easy to scan. Please let me know what you think of the above though.

@mrpinchy, I see that Nismo reached out with help (thank you Nismo!). If you still need help just let me know.

@Linkseo and @caver01, I am planning on doing a version specific for 4:3 ratio resolutions as soon as I finish work on the handheld I am building. Nismo is correct - it's difficult to make one theme support 4:3 and 16:9 if you have graphical elements in place (like the CRT outline in my theme). So I am aiming to have a version that can be downloaded to work on 4:3 screens. It might look like this: http://i.imgur.com/pubsyyv.png

Thank you everyone