Please test: Random Game selection/launch via Video Screensaver

**Scannigan**

Definitely not there only save metadata on exit and the option for parsing

pjft

@__Scannigan__ Ok. Can you try getting the latest binary I just uploaded, then?

cd /home/pi/tmp-es
wget https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/v0.3/emulationstation
openssl md5 emulationstation
chmod +x emulationstation
cd /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation
sudo cp /home/pi/tmp-es/emulationstation /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation
openssl md5 emulationstation

MD5 should be, in both instances:

MD5 (emulationstation) = 0779436c961bfcb9f18c0c03a737f129

The option should definitely be there in this build.

**Scannigan**

Still nothing, have all the options for the screensaver but no options for VRAM so still WSOD, I have noticed that it was saving to a file called emulationstation.3 would that make a difference I've also noticed a number of similar files emulationstation.1, emulationstation.2, emulationstation.3 and emulationstation.4

pjft

@__Scannigan__ It needs to replace the file called emulationstation (not .1 or .x), as that's the one RetroPie launches. I wasn't aware that wget didn't overwrite the original file. That explains the .1 etc.

Perform this, then. It will first remove the file before downloading. Hope it works now.

Confirm that the MD5 hashes match in the end, and that they are the same of my last post:

MD5 (emulationstation) = 0779436c961bfcb9f18c0c03a737f129

cd /home/pi/tmp-es
rm emulationstation
wget https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/v0.3/emulationstation
openssl md5 emulationstation
chmod +x emulationstation
cd /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation
sudo cp /home/pi/tmp-es/emulationstation /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation
openssl md5 emulationstation

incunabula

Just wanted to say that i've got it working albeit with occasional screen blanking (as if the display is losing sync and reacquiring it). I'm using the binary you just uploaded today and have tested on both a 2 and a 3 running the Motion Blue theme. Not sure if this helps, but figured i would let you know since i've been lurking in this thread and have been looking forward to this feature. Let me know if there's anything i can help test and thanks for your hard work on this.

pjft

@incunabula hi, and thanks for the reply! I'm happy to know it works and that it's useful:)

Thanks for the report as well. That's extremely interesting.

I'd love to learn more about the flicker. I had that when I ran into several OMX Player processes competing for the same layer. That usually happened when I killed the ES but the screensaver was on. Does it happen to you on a fresh reboot?

Can you pinpoint some of the circumstances where it happens? And what options do you have turned on?

Specifically:

is it in the screensaver only?
in the middle of the movies vs changing movie?
frequency?
are you using the experimental player for the theme?
what if you turn off the game caption on screensaver? Does it still happen?
does it happen with the previous build at

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/v0.2/emulationstation

?

I may suggest updating OMX Player just in case.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install omxplayer

Let me know more!

Thanks.

incunabula

It's definitely related to the captions - i disabled them and it ran for 10 minutes with no problems. Re-enabled them and the screen blanking returned. I tried it on my lcd tv and it looks like it was trying to set the resolution to 1920x1078 (according to the tv's overlay that displays when there is a resolution change) when the captions were on screen, but the blanking/sync loss would keep occurring after they had faded out. This occurs with both players, but i'll try updating omx and see how that goes.

incunabula

Updating omxplayer didn't seem to help and I've also tried 2 other themes but the blanking continues. I may try with a fresh image soon; the one I'm testing with is a few months old and somewhat cluttered.

pjft

@incunabula thanks for the effort in testing! The detail you sent helps a lot. Don't worry about a new image, it'll be a waste of time. It's definitely OMX Player related.

I have an idea that might fix that, and I'll put together a new build tomorrow for you to test. I ran into a similar problem during development with the subtitles, hence that being one of my suggestions. :)

Truth be told, after I changed a couple of things it went away, so I thought it was fixed. Obviously I was wrong.

If it doesn't work then, I may be out of options. We'll see.

Does it not try to set that resolution when there are no subtitles? What resolution does it attempt to use in that case? And what's the resolution of your screen?

Thanks! Talk tomorrow:)

incunabula

@pjft Without the captions it's running 1920 x 1080 which is what I normally run es in. Will switching to ffmpeg allow the captions feature? Seems like that would be the best of both worlds if so - hardware decoding and the nifty features we want (I was reading the es video preview thread earlier).

**Scannigan**

@pjft By jove you've done it!! That worked a treat. One final thing, is there a way to make the screensaver full screen?

pjft

@incunabula Hopefully :) That's where we want to go. @fieldofcows is investigating that. I don't see why not. In fact, if we get that running, we might not need to do this hackily via subtitles, but maybe via a proper overlay!

I changed the fullscreen rendering from OMX. Test out this new build and see how it goes. It's a shot in the dark, as I don't have visibility into the inner workings of OMX Player :/

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/tag/v0.4

i.e.

mkdir /home/pi/tmp-es
cd /home/pi/tmp-es
rm emulationstation
wget https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/v0.4/emulationstation
chmod +x emulationstation
cd /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation
sudo cp /home/pi/tmp-es/emulationstation /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation

@Scannigan I'm happy it's working out! The video should be as full screen as EmulationStation (i.e. if ES has some borders for you, the video will also do it). Or do you mean that the video should be stretched? The reason it isn't is because different games had different resolutions - and truth be told, none of them were 16:9 :) That's why there are always side borders at least.

Happy to consider stretching if it helps, though I found it made games look deformed.

**Scannigan**

@pjft ES is full screen I think the image would need to be stretched, if it's too much trouble don't worry about it, I'm sure I can live with it :)

pjft

@__Scannigan__ I see.

I'm sure it's not a big deal to implement that, just another option though.

I'll look into making that change and publishing a new build.

pjft

@__Scannigan__

If you run the previous commands but use the link to this binary on wget, it should now have an option in "Other Settings" for stretching the video on the screen saver.

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/0.4stretch/emulationstation

Best.

incunabula

@pjft I tried the 0.4 release and the issue persists :( I want to try it on a fresh image so i'll let you know how that goes.

pjft

@incunabula I'm sorry to hear that.

I'll provide you with a full set of commands to run later for the purpose of troubleshooting.

Would you have a video of the behavior, for me to see what's happening? I take it you haven't edited your config.txt file in any way that you know of, in regards to the video output?

Also, could you run the following commands and register their output? (Taken from here).

Run “tvservice –m CEA” to give a list of CEA supported modes.
Run “tvservice –m DMT” to give a list of DMT supported modes.
Run “tvservice -s” to give you the current state.

Then, the following:

Run “tvservice –d test.txt” to capture a monitor’s EDID.
Pass this file to edidparser. Run “edidparser test.txt”.

Thanks.

Edit: I also found this about updating your kernel, might be worth a shot if you have a backup of your pi or a second card:

http://stevenhickson.blogspot.ie/2013/02/updating-your-raspberry-pi-packages.html?m=1

What's the output of

uname -a

For you?

I'll send over the commands for further digging later. Thanks for the help here.

Also, what pi model are you on? 2? 3? I take it you have never changed the GPU memory split settings, right?

pjft

@incunabula hi!

If you're moderately comfortable with playing in the command line and editing files, see this other thread:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7739/video-splash-screen-problems/

Some people who seemed to have similar issues sorted it out by tweaking the config.txt file. See if any of that helps and let us know.

Ignore the references to 10000 - that's on the OMX Player side. I'll send the list of commands later to test. On my phone at the moment.

In particular:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Set

disable_overscan=1

Does it help? If not, revert it back to how it was before (I take it it was 0?).

**Scannigan**

@pjft Thanks so much, this is fothermucking amazing!

Noticed a few other settings that weren't there before which is nice :)

Did stumble across the following errors though after screensaver looping one video and controls becoming unresponsive, it's only happened once so far.

lvl0: Error creating SDL window!
Could not create GLES window surface
lvl0: Renderer failed to initialize!
lvl0: Window failed to initialize!

pjft

@__Scannigan__ Thanks - glad it worked out.

I'm curious about that error. I usually don't like to dismiss them and say they're not related to this, given how many times I've been wrong in the past :)

However, that stack trace is in the main.cpp file, and it's a stack trace from failing to initialize the renderer, which then fails to initialize the window.

It may also happen when restarting ES after launching a game, but we shouldn't have a log of that message: "Window failed to initialize".

Did this per chance happen after you launched a game from the screensaver? Had you quit ES at any point in time and launched it again?

Is it working fine otherwise?

Thanks!