Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi

MWGemini

Why do you have your videos in that folder?

@Nismo Do you recommend placing them somewhere else? If so, where? That's the default location for @sselph 's scraper I believe, and the UXS scraper from @screech as well. I certainly don't mind moving them (and at some point will probably move them to the ROM folders so I can keep the operating system separate from the ROMs).

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

Yes. I am using a modified version of the tronkyfran theme. I've changed some of the background images, and yesterday I put the files from your MAME folder into my theme's Arcade folder. Basically I replaced the tronkyfran Arcade theme with your MAME theme. It displays fine (and looks great!), but some videos don't play (but some do, so I'm not sure what's causing it). I will spend more time investigating it tomorrow.

Nismo

@MWGemini You can't do that, all the themes requires a main.xml file, and i'm sure tronkyfran theme main.xml it's not the same than mine, so the theme would not work at 100% because the lack of lot of data, or not the same positions for gamelist, textsize, etc. Also some values for videos are there. You break all the theme. And my theme use a folder named art that i'm realizing you didn't copy inside the tronkyfran's theme folder...

Anyway, there is no reason for some videos to play and others doesn't.

I don't recommend to use downloaed_images folder for videos. I use folders inside my rom folders, for example:

/roms/megadrive/videos/sonic.mp4

Then in your gamelist.xml only need this:

<video>./videos/sonic.mp4</video>

The same for marquees.

Also I don't understand why you have a subfolder for each game...

Regards.

fieldofcows

@darknior said in Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi:
I'm glad the omxplayer PoC build works for you - it means we're on the right track

@fieldofcows Oups i don't see this thread before :p
i have made two test this evening :
...
But it don't works fine :p

In order for VLC to use acceleration the VLC library needs to be rebuilt rather than installing it from the repository. That would be difficult to do as part of the ES build. I may look into this at some point but using omxplayer seems like a perfect workaround as long as the issues can be sorted. Ultimately the user will be able to choose through configuration which video player to use.

pjft

@fieldofcows hi! I'm back and I've just tried it out. It plateaued at 65 for me, playing the 640x480@60fps vídeo, and fixed any artifacts. Well done! @Nismo tried your videos and it was the same, so if this ends up moving to the main branch, your videos are good in the current format.

A question, if I may: the screen saver did not play a random video, do I need to do something for that to happen, or is it in a different branch?

Cheers!

MWGemini

@Nismo I did put in the other relevant files. I can send you my custom theme if you want to check and see if I missed something.

I'll also work on moving my images and videos, but for the moment, it's working.

@fieldofcows I did just discover that while re-testing your WSOD fix (v4), the videos that weren't playing with Nismo's theme and your latest omxplayer fix (v5), they play with v4 (the WSOD fix). Still seeing the temp and video glitch issues that were in that older version. I'm going to try to switch back to v5 and see what I can find out.

Nismo

@MWGemini I'm curious how rpi can handle h265 videos, i'll upload some of them tomorrow for your testing.

esmoger

Hi all, new here, just set this up tonight and I'm having a couple issues that I haven't seen anyone mention.. not sure if they're bugs or something wrong with my setup.

I installed the latest version of ES with video support - the one with the video that goes over top of the UI. On initial boot, it works as expected(except for the second bug below, but that's very minor), but after I launch a game and then return to ES, videos mostly stop working. As I navigate the game list, videos play infrequently and randomly. If I restart ES, it's back to normal. It's not a case of some specific videos working and some not - for example if i select and deselect a game over and over, the video will EVENTUALLY load, and then as soon as i move off and come back it's back to not loading.

Also, a lesser bug I'm experiencing is that if I hold my joystick down to roll over a bunch of games at once, the video for the game I stop on won't load until I move off of the game and come back back to it.

I'm using the oldroom theme, just modified it a little to fit my cabinet (biggest change I made was cropping the background image to better fit my vertical monitor..other than that just a few moved images and a few elements moved or removed). And I only have 2 systems enabled..

Anyone else experiencing this? Anything I can troubleshoot? Thanks!

edit: just noticed that if i quit ES, SSH into the machine and launch it that way, then it works as expected - I can launch games, come back, and all videos still play. any ideas what the functional difference is between launching it via ssh and the machine's startup script? on the surface the only difference that i see is that when i'm launched from ssh, instead of the game art splash as the game is loading, i just see whatever terminal output is behind ES for a moment, blown up into the space that the game art would usually take.

Nismo

@esmoger I didn't see anybody in this forum with that problem.

@MWGemini Here you have a little pack of 3 videos encoded with h265 at 480p and the same videos at 360p for testing. The download is only 5mb.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/rf61nlgtdhq3blr/Video_snaps_for_testing.zip

Please try to test with and without hardware acceleration if it's possible.

Anyway i'm thinking in re-encode all the 480p videos again and downscale to 360p for better filesize, but it means that I need to loose all my re-enconding work and start from scratch. But the quality it's almost the same and filesize it's better, with the advantage of better performance on rpi.

Thanks in advance.

MWGemini

@Nismo I will try to test those videos today and let you know.

@esmoger I have not personally seen the issues you are describing, but will attempt to reproduce them when I get some time later today to do some more testing.

esmoger

Following up on the bug I posted about last night, I just confirmed that it's not related to the theme - tried another one and didn't modify it at all, but had the same issues.

About to try out the previous version of ES that people were having temperature issues with.

EDIT: Installed the -4 version from before omxplayer support was added, and now ES behaves as expected .. watching now to see if i have the overheating issues that others had.. my pi is not in a case(it's mounted bare inside a bartop arcade cabinet) and has a heatsink, so fingers crossed that i won't have an issue

fieldofcows

Hi @esmoger. Please don't expect that version of ES to be stable. It was just a proof of concept I threw together to compare two different methods of rendering video. It needs a fair bit more work before it's worthy of inclusion into a final release.

For video, you should be using the latest official retropie version of ES.

esmoger

@fieldofcows Thanks, I missed that the official release had video support now.. does it have advantages over your -4 version? That seems to be working as expected except for maybe that heat issue(watching it to see what happens).

fieldofcows

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

does it have advantages over your -4 version?

It has the advantage that it works reliably :D The heat issue is not a problem for everyone. Although my RPis get hot when rendering video I've never seen a temperature warning myself.

esmoger

@fieldofcows thanks, looking good for me so far.

Sat and watched the temps with video playing and they peaked at 73 and then wavered between 72.5 and 73.1 . when the screensaver activates(set to "dim") the video stops playing and temps fall back to mid-50's .. works for me.

naxxi

hum.... i dont understand all i'v missed some things?
where have you see Retropie official ES has video support? there no new version since novembre 2k16
and i find no news about any video preview works on retropie ES
have you some link?

MWGemini

@naxxi The last pre-built image is from November, but you can also install RetroPie from source code, which is more recent.

That being said, it's still being perfected, so if you are not okay with things taking a little tweaking to get right, I would wait a bit.

@fieldofcows @Nismo work has been very busy for me this week, so I have not had time to test more of this in several days. I won't have time until the end of the week or possibly this weekend, but I haven't forgotten about it. It's next on my list as soon as I get a bit of free time!

Nismo

@MWGemini No problem mate, take your time, we all have a life.
Thanks for your interest.

naxxi

@fieldofcows @esmoger @MWGemini
Thanks for fast answer i'v update emulation station from source and it's work it compile last version like we can do with emulator experimental package ;)
sorry 'if i'm little less informed than you i'm tring to discover and learn this stuff ^^

for now i'm go back to finish editing my "xlm" file to ad video for all my games :)

I really want to cheer you and all other people here you made some great stuff and share it with us, it's just amazing and also you help me with my noob question lol :)

fieldofcows

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

That being said, it's still being perfected, so if you are not okay with things taking a little tweaking to get right, I would wait a bit.

Not quite. The version of video preview in the source code is stable and complete but can cause an over temperature warning and throttling if you have inadequate cooling of your pi.

darknior

I read the EmulationStation commits ... and it is so cool to see the official relaese of Retropie use the good code of @fieldofcows for video and WSOD :D
But for the moment i will continue to use your BETA, it is better for my Pie lol

Some questions please :p
I know it is not the good place for it but like we speak about video preview ...

Is the EmulationStation for Kids an other complète project ?
Because we can install and try it, some opion like HIDDEN, KIDS, FAVORITE etc ... are cool :D
But without video preview it is bad :(
I like the @Nismo skin ... And i use it ... :D
I have manually mount a big 1To hard drive for all the games ISOS and Videos who are many times bigger than the game lol
I make my path in the gamelist.xml to have all the stuff on the USB drive !
And i put the gamelist.xml himself in the roms dirs too.
But ... is it possible to modify something without changing ES source code to have them update on the USB drive, when i make a scrap ? Because for now ES update the list on SD card :(
Always for the USB drive ... i have use the official tutorial :
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive
Before i do it my OpenBOR games are working fine on SD Card, i launch them with a .SH ... one by game with a bash command. Like that i can skin these games on ES with informations and video preview.
But now there are on the USB drive the bash don't work fine and write me denied access :(
I have change the <command> like that :
Find the < command > section and simply add bash so it looks <command>bash %ROM</command>
But it is same no access right :(