maxSize Video only working in 1 direction (aspect)

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Oh. That's certainly not how I observe it on my end. maxSize works as expected on my vertical videos - they just look slightly narrower.

Your theme works just fine on my end, no glGet errors. Have you tried to go back to your previous version of the theme to see what might be the cause? I do get some slight white screens every now and then, but it's just a second or so until the textures load. If you share the exact details of the error, maybe we can better identify the issue.

As for my situation in particular, I now understand what's happening, and technically, all implementations are "correct", even though they aren't exactly accurate :)

What's happening is that when we're rendering the videos to a texture, we're assuming the pixel aspect to be 1:1, and we create a texture of that size. However, the truth is that several games have different pixel aspect rations that - thankfully - are captured in the video metadata.

Case in point, for my Alien vs Predator video:

Width                                    : 384 pixels
Height                                   : 224 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 4:3
Original display aspect ratio            : 4:3

When we render it pixel by pixel in the texture, it will look stretched horizontally, as the pixel ratio is actually 1.714:1, even though the display aspect ratio is actually 4:3 (or 1.33:1).

When we render it in a video player, natively (either in the PC, or just letting OMX Player handling the rendering without forcing it to stretch) it will use the video's expected aspect ratio and preserve it, unlike our pixel-to-texture-size assumption.

@jdrassa : Now, we could perhaps base our maxSize assumptions on one (or two) of the following three instead:

libvlc_video_get(mMediaPlayer)
tracks[track]->video->i_sar_num and/or tracks[track]->video->i_sar_den

I haven't tested to know what the output of those are, but they might help solve the aspect ration issues on maxSize via VLC rendering.

Whether these are the same problems @TMNTturtlguy is experiencing, I don't know - can you share your 1943 video? That does look weird. The Altered Beast one seems to be similar to the case I'm describing, but without knowing the exact metadata of the video I'm just guessing.

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft I think I figured out what is happening to my theme. I completely did an update all and used my original posted theme that I know was working pefectly. At first it was going white and the only errors are glget errors. I tried upping my VRAM but it got worse, interestingly enough when I lower my vram to 60, it works super fast without any white flashing! So more investigation needed there. I also noticed that on the main ES build, my video and meta data are no longer showing up on games within folders....we worked on that issue a few months ago and both the screensaver and main branch had been updated to allow this to work. Again, more testing on this. A bunch of unexplained changes all happening at once.

I will try to post my videos of 1942 and altered beast, maybe to a Dropbox link?

More to come later. Thanks for all your support and help

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Hm. Interesting.

I believe your findings on VRAM are accurate, as I've expressed several times without any particular empirical confirmation.

That being said, you are correct: the metadata changes for folders aren't yet approved to be merged on the main ES - I imagine they're waiting on someone to review them.

So that will only work on my fork, for the time being, until it's approved there.

Glad to hear you're getting things back to a workable place.

As for your videos, sure, a dropbox link would work!

Thanks.

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft I again tested max size settings in the updated main branch ES with no luck. Here is a link to videos on a dropbox folder. Let me know if this works. I have placed the 1942 video, the altered beast video and a nintendo DS video which is also a vertical format that stretches the same as the 1942 video.
Edit - Deleted Link - Thanks for trouble shooting @pjft!

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Thanks.

Yes, for some reason, these videos are reporting a resolution that doesn't match the aspect ratio. This is what I get by running MediaInfo on them.

The correct aspect ratio, observed by a media player, is listed. The comments on actual computed ratio is just my note, from dividing width / height. For some reason those two vertical videos of yours are substantially wider than what I expected (as you see, they are more wide than they are tall).

That is what VLC will likely be using, as it tries to create a rendering surface proportional to the size being reported in the dimensions.

Did you convert/process them yourself using any particular tool?

I find Handbrake to be a good tool. If you want to fix your video collection, just run them all via Handbrake, and set "Anamorphic" to OFF. This should fix help match their pixels to the aspect ratio.

Or use OMX Player as an alternative, for the time being.

Altered Beast:

Width                                    : 480 pixels
Height                                   : 224 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 1.85:1
// [Actual computed ratio from pixels]   : 2.143:1 

1942: 

Width                                    : 480 pixels
Height                                   : 360 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 0.749
Original display aspect ratio            : 0.750
// [Actual computed ratio from pixels]   : 1.33:1 / 4:3

Atari:

Width                                    : 480 pixels
Height                                   : 346 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 0.680
// [Actual computed ratio from pixels]   : 1.387:1

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft You are my HERO! I did use handbrake on my videos to decrease their file size. I did this at your recommendation prior to the OMX player. I just left them all as smaller size because they play just fine at that size, the small amount of quality loss is ok with me. I will try to re-run the vertical videos as you have suggested later on today. Unfortunately i have work meetings all day :(

A side note. I have your newest build up and running beautifully at VRAM 60 - half of what i had it on with the older build....such weird things with VRAM! I noticed that with the OMX player and the updates you made, is the theme just says <size> it OMX will now stretch to the size, and if I have <maxSize> OMX will hold its aspect ratio correctly. So per your findings above, the OMX player will see the aspect correctly, VLC will not. In your prior build with OMX, the OMX player always played the correct aspect, but i suppose that was prior to <maxSize> being available.

Lastly, yes, my games within folders works perfectly in your Fork as well! Thanks to you, I have this really awesome arcade cabinet build that is beyond my wildest dreams when I started. I truly appreciate all your support and hard work on here, you make this community and retropie an even more amazing place.

I will post my updated theme with more systems added when I return home again. I already have ideas for my next theme using your build and carousel!

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Thanks. Yes, likely some setting in Handbrake must have "messed" them up in the conversion (i.e. changed them in a way that, for implementation reasons, VLC doesn't handle properly in the current setup).

Run all videos, as even the horizontal one might have the wrong ratio. Just drop the folder in Handbrake, set Anamorphic to "OFF" and run it for 1 video. Then open it in VLC on your computer, or Media Info and see if the new reported resolution is more reasonable. :)

Yes, I now force the videos to stretch if the theme explicitly uses size, and to keep aspect ratio if it uses maxSize. I assumed that that is how it's meant to be. I previously used to have a setting in the menu to force stretch videos in the theme view, but realistically it doesn't do anything right now - I need to remove it from the menu!

@jdrassa do you confirm that the semantics I'm assuming for maxSize keeping aspect ratio, and size forcing to stretch the video to the available video element size?

Cheers.

TMNTturtlguy

@jdrassa thanks for your support as well. I appreciate all you do and your help in trouble shooting!

duiz

Is there a windows build that implements the maxSize for videos? My build doesn't seem to honor the tag in the xml file.

pjft

@duiz I would suspect the latest build of the main branch would support it. If not, I believe @jdrassa had some Windows builds he was sharing - I'd search for EmulationStation Windows builds in the forums.

My latest code would be here:

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/tree/ES-OMX-Master-Merged-Stable

If anyone wants to compile it, though the only new things it has is screensaver support and filtering. The OMX Player changes are not relevant to Windows. In fact, I can't promise it'll compile for Windows as I never attempted it, though I tried to keep things tidy so that it would.