Video Screensaver in Emulation Station

Dominus

@fieldofcows with the OMXPlayer will that stream the 480p videos better? I find the 480p videos I have, bog down the system when scrolling through the games, but the smaller 240 ones don't have that issue, just the overheating on some. Just wondering if I should change my 480s to 240s here, or wait?

Zigurana

@fieldofcows : are you considering pulling in my PR on the go to random game screensaver-type?
I'd appreciate any feedback you might have on the code, style, or otherwise.

fieldofcows

@Zigurana Certainly, I'll take a look. I hadn't spotted the PR - I don't normally look there as mine is not an 'official' fork.
What exactly does it do? On my initial quick look at the code it seems to switch to a random gamelist view and select the game when the screensaver cuts in, as well as adding a new menu option to surprise me.

Apologies if you've already written about this but I can't remember - you know, limited time and all that.

Zigurana

@fieldofcows yeah, you've got the gist of it.
I now realize the PR was a little too sparse, I've added a comment to better explain my thinking behind the feature.

Zigurana

@fieldofcows and by all means, take your time. This is a minor feature, I just remembered it myself, so I thought to remind you of the pending PR.

Dominus

Anyone else having troubles quiting ES after doing this? I thought I could deal with having to unplug the system as it won't reboot, shutdown or even just quit ES anymore. Just hangs after exiting to the black screen/command line area. Sometimes after a few minutes it'll say some warning and give up, then go to the command line where I can actually do stuff. Thing that sucks is I can't do any work from inside ES in regard to renaming files or adding things to metadata, as it won't save anymore. Anyone else get this at all? Any idea what to do?

jimdick

@fieldofcows

Hey, Great Idea!

Ive been looking for an alternate screensaver for a while now.

Im just having issues setting it up, hoping you could help!

When i'm installing dependencies, I get a 404 error - failed to fetch.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Cheers

fiestaracer

This is an awesome addition. Just got mine running and I love it. Thanks.

mrbone

@fiestaracer
Hello, Could you tell me what format of videos you are using and exactly what directory you are putting them. Perhaps you could share some of the videos you are using? I just can not for the life of me figure out how to get this to work properly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

Dominus

@fieldofcows Does this still work with 4.2, and is it the same way to setup?

Dominus

Any news on this??

SuperFromND

Is there any way to set it to ONLY use a specific video file, instead of having to use one from a gamelist?

pjft

@SuperCatFooz Not in the current implementation, no.

SuperFromND

@pjft Aw, man. I was thinking of making a ton of dummy "system" folders and linking to a video file to try and trick the random video selector to picking out the video as a screensaver.

pjft

@SuperCatFooz do you currently have videos in your gamelist, though? I thought you had videos, but still wanted to use a specific one for the screensaver. From your last comment it seems you may not have videos and just wanted to add one or two for the screensaver, is that it?

Let me know and I'll get back to you tomorrow after looking at the code.

SuperFromND

@pjft Yeah, apart from my boot splash I have no videos because my curent favorite theme (Pixel-Metadata) doesn't really support them yet.

pjft

@SuperCatFooz got it.

In that case definitely try to create a dummy ROM or system with a video in the metadata.

See how it goes. I know it counts the number of video tags it finds to determine how many videos to randomize over.

I don't have the code at the moment though (on my phone) so I'm not fully sure how the iteration goes afterwards, but it should work in principle.

Let me know.

The key thing is for that system to have a gamelist with a game with the video tag.

Also, be mindful of the player you're using and the video resolution. I'm partial to OMX Player, so see if that is selected for the screensaver:)

SuperFromND

@pjft Yeah, unfortunately it didn't seem to work. :(

pjft

@SuperCatFooz even though I had some hope, I can't say I'm surprised :)

How many videos did you use, out of curiosity?

Also, I do those systems show up in EmulationStation? Could you check whether that video actually plays in the gamelist view, just to check whether the tag is actually correct? You may need to use a theme that supports video for the test, if yours doesn't.

Let me know.

SuperFromND

@pjft I tried making a new folder in EmulationStation's gamelist folder simply titled "dummy", then proceeded to have the gamelist be filled with 1024 entries of the same dummy ROM file (which for me, was /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/dummy/dummyfile.test) with the video attached. It didn't pick the video file that was attached, so I'm assuming it only scans for systems that are actually attached to a listed system in es_systems.cfg.

However, I did find a solution: By adding the video line to RetroPie's gamelist.xml and forcing ES to show detailed view only, I did manage to get the video to show only as a screensaver, while also preventing any kind of visible "dummy" entry.