Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi

MWGemini

@fieldofcows My theme is a modified version of tronkyfran, which I haven't yet built video support into, but still plays the videos just fine.

I was able to successfully play videos (both the '88 games and 19xx I referenced earlier) from the command line with omxplayer.

MWGemini

As an added bit of info, I've been letting the 19xx video (the one that glitched previously) loop for the last 7 minutes and counting, and it's not showing any graphical glitches, and my temps are in the low to mid 40s (with fan on and case open). This is on par with my ES + screensaver temps, and lower than my ES idle (no screensaver) temps.

pjft

@MWGemini that's the one that plateaued around 63 in the previous tests, same conditions, correct? Those are promising results.

What do you mean by "haven't built video support in the theme yet it plays the videos" though?

MWGemini

@pjft That's the one that helped push it over 80 with a closed case and no fan, and was in the low to mid 60s with case open and fan on. So yes, early results look promising.

I'm not super familiar with how the themes load videos as far as the tags go, but the tronkyfran theme wasn't specifically built to support videos. When I scraped some videos for my arcade games (using the UXS tool), they just happened to be able to play, so I haven't spent much time delving into that. I know that the OldRoom theme that @Nismo created is looking for videos with a certain tag, and I didn't scrape my videos in a way that works with his theme. I figure the fix is to either edit my theme to explicitly support videos, or to re-scrape my videos (or edit the gamelists) so that the OldRoom theme can find them. So far, I haven't had to do that. If the console output is correct, then omxplayer is still being called, it just didn't display within the theme. Could be a theme issue, could be a bug in the code. I'll see what I can do to debug the issue...

pjft

@MWGemini Apologies, but I'm not fully following. I'm tired, though, so that may play a part in it.

To the best of my understanding, the videos themselves don't need to be in any way different.

The gamelist.xml file, though, needs to have a <video> tag with the path to the video. For example, for 19xx I have:

<game>
<path>./19xx.zip</path>
<name>19XX: The War Against Destiny (USA 951207)</name>
<desc>North American & European release. Game developed in Japan. For more information about the game itself, please see the original Japanese release entry; "19XX - The War Against Destiny [Green Board]".</desc>
<image>./images/19xx.png</image>
<thumbnail>
</thumbnail>
<rating>0.858</rating>
<releasedate>1996</releasedate>
<developer>Capcom</developer>
<publisher>
</publisher>
<genre>Shooter / Flying Vertical</genre>
<players>2</players>
<favorite>true</favorite>
<kidgame>false</kidgame>
<hidden>false</hidden>
<playcount>1</playcount>
<lastplayed>20161021T225800</lastplayed>
<video>/home/pi/RetroPie/videos/arcade/19xx.mp4</video>
<marquee>/home/pi/RetroPie/marquees/arcade/19xx.png</marquee>
</game>

That path should be the path to your video. In my case, I have it in a separate folder instead of under RetroPie/roms, so you may need to change that as needed.

Second, the theme itself needs to have a Video View defined, and a video element there.

I'd recommend downloading Carbon here:

https://github.com/jrassa/es-theme-carbon/tree/video-view

and copying it to your /etc/emulationstation/themes folder (under a folder with the name you want, for instance carbon-video). OldRoom is also a good alternative, Nismo posted some links to it earlier.

If you just want to test something, create a single folder for a system you have no roms for, add there a dummy file with the proper extension (.zip, for instance), and then create a simple gamelist.xml file with

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<gameList>
<game>
<path>./19xx.zip</path>
<name>19XX: The War Against Destiny (USA 951207)</name>
<desc>North American & European release. Game developed in Japan. For more information about the game itself, please see the original Japanese release entry; "19XX - The War Against Destiny [Green Board]".</desc>
<image>./images/19xx.png</image>
<thumbnail>
</thumbnail>
<rating>0.858</rating>
<releasedate>1996</releasedate>
<developer>Capcom</developer>
<publisher>
</publisher>
<genre>Shooter / Flying Vertical</genre>
<players>2</players>
<favorite>true</favorite>
<kidgame>false</kidgame>
<hidden>false</hidden>
<playcount>1</playcount>
<lastplayed>20161021T225800</lastplayed>
<video>/home/pi/RetroPie/videos/arcade/19xx.mp4</video>
<marquee>/home/pi/RetroPie/marquees/arcade/19xx.png</marquee>
</game>
</gameList>

Changing the path of the video and the path of the rom to point to your dummy rom file.

That should cause it to load the video view in the theme.

As it's not clear to me what you had done on your end, I hope this helps. And if not, maybe it helps others. :)

The fact that you're getting the omxplayer messages leads me to believe that it's being called, so you may already be getting the video view for those games. Weird.

pjft

@fieldofcows What video formats have you tried on your end? Could you try with a mp4 file, like one of the ones I linked to earlier? Just to confirm that it's not a video format thing?

MWGemini

@pjft I've got the <video> tags in my gamelist file, but for some reason the OldRoom theme doesn't display them.
At any rate, with a little fiddling of switching themes around, I've got my videos playing again.

@fieldofcows I repeated the tests I posted earlier, and with the case open and fan off, my temps are actually a bit lower than they were previously while idling on the carousel view, although the ambient temps are a little lower now.

I pulled the fan and closed up the case and let the videos continue to cycle. Currently, the highest temps I've seen are in the low 50s. In other words, the temperature change using the new code is barely noticeable from when the Pi is just idling and not playing a video. I have not seen any graphical glitches of any kind for the videos (videos are playing better now than they were before). Edit: max temps after 10+ minutes of video playing are with fan off and closed case are now hitting about 60.

I did notice some corrupted text characters in the menus while switching themes around (an issue I saw during v2 of the WSOD fix, I think). Also, the screensaver does not disable the video anymore. For stress-testing purposes, that's okay, as I can leave the video running indefinitely, but just wanted to mention it. So, a few bugs to work out perhaps, but the broad strokes of this fix definitely appear to be a solid fix.

If you have other tests you'd like me to run, just let me know.

pjft

@MWGemini Wow. Those are great news then! Thanks for the report. Looking very much forward to trying this out then.

MWGemini

@pjft @fieldofcows Video has been cycling for close to 30 minutes now, with fan off and case closed. Temps are currently about 64.5, which is down 1 degree from a few minutes ago. It may have stabilized at these temps, but I will continue to monitor and will update if they increase.

Edit: after about 40 minutes, it's now around 67°C. Probably still climbing, but it's very slow. Definitely a HUGE improvement.

pjft

@MWGemini confirming: 640x480@60fps? No artifacts?

Well done @fieldofcows !

I suppose next steps, while you're at it, is to test out one of the videos @Nismo put together earlier. If they work well now, then that's good news for his video packs. I expect they would work well, but worth checking.

Thank you very much for testing this out. It might be worth sharing this build with the other folks who were talking about overheating in other threads here.

Nismo

@pjft I agree, please test my pack and if not working well, i can downscale the videos, but i stopped all my re-encoding until I see I don't wasting my time...

MWGemini

@pjft 50 minutes and counting on the 19xx video mentioned above (640x480, 59fps). No artifacts currently, but I also stepped away for a bit so haven't been watching every frame. Temps currently in the high 60s (67-69).

@Nismo I'd be happy to test your pack if you can link me to it and provide instructions for how to get it installed.

pjft

@MWGemini thanks. I believe there's no point in keeping them running for longer, though. The temperature send to have plateaued, and they're at decent enough ranges that I would not worry about overheating. Well done.

As for the pack, just download it, choose a video and then you can replace (rename) to one of the videos you're currently already using. Make a backup copy of the original though. It's probably easier than setting up the full video library.

Nismo

@MWGemini I uploaded a megadrive-genesis pack of videos for testing a few posts ago... here is the link:

https://mega.nz/#!h9lEERaY!Kk6AdgQXSp2FKXJDBbujHGPFNRPtYnaZuir8HznWCrw

MWGemini

@pjft @fieldofcows I've let it go another 30 minutes with the screensaver active but the video still playing (so ~60 minutes with the screensaver off, and another 30 with the screensaver on). Temps are now hovering just around 60°C with fan off and case closed. No graphical glitches to report, other than the font issues I saw earlier.

@Nismo my apologies. Lots of text in this thread, and lots of active threads. It's getting harder for me to remember everything being said. I'm pulling down your pack now and will try to get it running and tested sometime in the next few hours.

MWGemini

@fieldofcows I've also noticed that when quitting EmulationStation now, text typed in the terminal does not show up, but commands are still executed. I did a little searching and found that executing the "reset" command fixes this. I'm guessing that omxplayer isn't releasing something that the terminal needs for text display.

@Nismo I downloaded your pack, but I'm still having trouble getting videos to play consistently. I did have a thought, though. All of my ROMs are grouped in folders by the game name. Perhaps that's causing problems? Here's a snip from my gamelist:

      <game id="3371" source="theGamesDB.net">
          <path>./3 Ninjas Kick Back/3 Ninjas Kick Back (U) [!].gen</path>
          <name>3 Ninjas Kick Back (U) [!]</name>
          <desc>3 Ninjas Kick Back follows 3 young ninja  brothers.</desc>
          <video>/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/megadrive/3 Ninjas Kick Back (USA).mp4</video>
		  <image>~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/megadrive/3 Ninjas Kick Back (U) [!]-image.jpg</image>
          <rating>0.4</rating>
          <releasedate>19940601T000000</releasedate>
          <developer>Malibu Interactive</developer>
          <publisher>Sony Imagesoft</publisher>
          <genre>Action</genre>
          <players>2</players>
      </game>

Also, strangely (still trying to figure out a pattern here), some of my Arcade games (the only system not grouped by folder, and where I was previously testing my videos) no longer play after moving the OldRoom's MAME theme into my Arcade theme. BUT, some videos that didn't play before now do. I've verified that all videos are still on the drive and are not corrupted, but I have no clue what's causing this strange behavior.

pjft

@MWGemini

Do you really have your video in

/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/megadrive/3 Ninjas Kick Back (USA).mp4

?

Why do you have it there, if you don't mind me asking? Deliberate?

That looks like a configuration template folder.

fieldofcows

Thanks @MWGemini for all this testing your doing.

Just to be on the safe side, I'll reiterate that the build I have provided is just a proof of concept at the moment. Basically, I got the code to a state where I could prove that it would play videos in place of the current view and then built it for people to try. There are going to be bugs.

The ones I know about from my testing and now your results:

The video is always on top. Nothing at present can be rendered over the video. This includes marquees in pixel video theme and the scanlines in oldroom
The video is rendered on top of GUI menus
Video continues to play when screensaver cuts in
Terminal stops echoing output when ES is exited after playing a video (I get this too)

Work that I know needs to be done if we agree this is the way forward:

Fix the issues above :)
Add an option in es_settings.cfg to configure the player and arguments (this will allow tweaking of options without recompiling and also allow, for example, mplayer on linux)
Add an option, maybe via the GUI to select software vs overlay rendering. The software rendering allows overlays on top of the video and fading in and out so gives a better visual performance. It also works on platforms other than the RPi

Nismo

@MWGemini said in Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi:

      <game id="3371" source="theGamesDB.net">
          <path>./3 Ninjas Kick Back/3 Ninjas Kick Back (U) [!].gen</path>
          <name>3 Ninjas Kick Back (U) [!]</name>
          <desc>3 Ninjas Kick Back follows 3 young ninja  brothers.</desc>
          <video>/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/megadrive/3 Ninjas Kick Back (USA).mp4</video>
		  <image>~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/megadrive/3 Ninjas Kick Back (U) [!]-image.jpg</image>
          <rating>0.4</rating>
          <releasedate>19940601T000000</releasedate>
          <developer>Malibu Interactive</developer>
          <publisher>Sony Imagesoft</publisher>
          <genre>Action</genre>
          <players>2</players>
      </game>

Why do you have your videos in that folder?

no longer play after moving the OldRoom's MAME theme into my Arcade theme.

What?, explain this to me please, you moved a folder from one theme to another?

darknior

@fieldofcows Oups i don't see this thread before :p
i have made two test this evening :

const char* args[] = { "--vout=omxil_vout", "--quiet"};
mVLC = libvlc_new(sizeof(args) / sizeof(args[0]), args);

and with "--vout=xcb_x11"

But it don't works fine :p
My Raspberry Pi was always at 70° ... and i always have the green glitch :(

I also try your new beta release :
https://github.com/fieldofcows/EmulationStation/releases

And it works like a dream :)
My proc was at 53°
And the green glitch have disappear :)
Yes the video is rendered on top of GUI menus ... but you will fix it later ;)

Thanks a lot :)