Video Splash Screen problems

MonkeyKng

@petechik That worked perfectly to fix the HDMI cut out issues on the splashscreen video. However now the image spills over the TV size. If I enable the overscan limits (e.g. overscan_left, etc.) the issue returns. Is there a way to boot up with disable_overscan then after the video splashscreen ends and emulation station boots enable the overscan limits?

gopherguts420

So initially what solved my problem was disabling Plymouth by adding plymouth.enable=0 to the first line in boot/cmdline.txt but yesterday was setting up Kodi and the overscan borders were bugging me bad so I manually adjusted them until I was satisfied. I just removed what I added to cmdline.txt and the splash is still working perfectly fine.

petechik

Disabling Plymouth didn't fix the splash screen for me. I've tried all the solutions that I could find on the forums but nothing worked except disabling overscan. But that comes at the cost of not having overscan. I like Monkeykng's idea of disabling overscan until the splash screen is done. But I don't know how to go about doing that.

thekobk

could be the speed of the sd card. I have 2 pi's and the one in the main room has a pi drive, the pi drive can not keep up and has similar issues. using the same file on the other pi's i have no issues.

rommager

Hi, I have the same issue. I have an interesting observation to add - I have used all the video splash screens successfully on a PC monitor with an HDMI to DVI-D cable, and I don't get any video or audio dropout (using composite audio, since it's a monitor). But when I connect to my Samsung TV (not a Smart TV), I get drop out particularly on longer videos. On my buddy's Sharp Aquos TV, the video drops out and the audio "fuzzes" out about half way through. I also want to say when I preview the videos in the splash screen setup, they all play fine on the TV.

So, it appears the following are the case:

The problem varies from TV to TV
The problem does not appear to be related to the HDMI cable (preview plays without issue)
It's not the SD card (preview plays without issue)
Longer videos appear to be flakier than shorter videos
Does not appear to be power related

Setup: Using a Pi 3 (CanaKit), and RetroPie 4.2.

IRgEEK

@rommager @gopherguts420

Hey guys, didn't know if you solved your issues so thought I'd share this.

In my case, my startup videos would break all up the last few seconds, and sometimes the display would just go black.

The way I solved it was to edit /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh script so that emulationstation wouldn't launch until the video player finished playing the startup video.

Not perfect, but now all startup vids play fine without me having to disable overscan etc.

*** Added wait below to autostart.sh before emulationstation line ***
while pgrep omxplayer & > /dev/null;
do sleep 1;
done

emulationstation #auto

Hopefully helps somebody. thx!

IRgEEK

@thekobk I thought was my SD card as well at first, but even with the fastest SD I could find, I was having same issues on longer startup videos. It seems my pi just couldn't handle playing videos and launching emulationstation at same time so I added a delay. See my other reply. Maybe not perfect but works :-)

rommager

@IRgEEK

Yeah, it actually makes sense, somewhat. I am guessing the pi gets pretty busy doing IO when loading emulationstation, and struggles to keep up with everything needed to keep a stable HDMI signal while booting? Maybe? But still, when I am connected to my monitor with a HDMI to DVI cable and analog audio, I get no issues at all...

I can see how this tweak will work, but the main beef I have is that the video splash is intended to give you something to watch while ES loads. Still, it is still a perfectly viable option because ES only takes a few seconds to load.

Still, two other possibilities come to mind. I wonder if they will work better?

Start omxplayer with a higher priority or niceness?
Start omxplayer on a different CPU core when available for the Pi2/3? This may not be an option for the pi zeroes, as I don't think the zeroes have multi core CPUs.

Either one of these might do the trick, but I also am not a Linux expert, so I don't know if these are viable options or not.

rommager

I tried the niceness idea by modifying the script /etc/init.d/asplashscreen

I tried adding the following into the omxplayer line in the asplashscreen script:
sudo nice --1 omxplayer...
sudo nice --10 omxplayer...
sudo nice --20 omxplayer ...
sudo ionice -c 2 omxplayer ...
sudo ionice -c 1 omxplayer ...

None of these modifications seemed to correct the issue. As stated by other users, I did try disabling overscan, and the videos do play though without completely dropping out, but there is a point in all videos where the sound drops for about half a second during boot. It's an improvement, but now the video goes off the edge of the TV screen.

Curiously, when I re-enabled overscan, the video splash screens continued to play the same way. Maybe I just need to cold boot the pi to make the problem resurface.

At any rate, I now know playing with the niceness doesn't seem to fix things. I do now have another theory on the issue. I have noticed that EmulationStation still starts in the background, and accepts input while the splash is playing. I am wondering if EmulationStation starting is corrupting the HDMI playback of the video. My thought is that EmulationStation initializes video modes and brings up its graphical screen when it launches, and those changes in video modes might be what is corrupting the HDMI signal while the video is playing. That behavior would explain why delaying the EmulationStation launch until after omxplayer terminates corrects the issue. That would also seem to explain why setting niceness doesn't fix the issue.

It may be that the best fix may be IRgEEK's fix to delay EmulationStation until after the video.

At this point, I think it does not seem to be an SD card, CPU, or an IO issue. I am suspecting it has more to do with EmulationStation changing the video mode in the background while the video is playing. I am not sure why it seems to work flawlessly on a monitor versus a TV though.

yodajjh

I added the fokowing to autostart.ch, and I can't get emulationstation to auto load. I get a "line 6: syntax error: unexpected end of file". I edited the file with notepad. The contents of the file are as follows:

while pgrep omxplayer &>/dev/null;
do sleep 1;
done

emulationstation #auto

Those fixed my video issue w/ the splash screen, but I've been unable to get emulation station to auto load. Would any of you have any suggestions to fix?

Thanks!

yodajjh

I added the following to autostart.ch, and I can't get emulationstation to auto load. I get a "line 6: syntax error: unexpected end of file". I edited the file with notepad. The contents of the file are as follows:

while pgrep omxplayer &>/dev/null;
do sleep 1;
done

emulationstation #auto

Those fixed my video issue w/ the splash screen, but I've been unable to get emulation station to auto load. Would any of you have any suggestions to fix?

Thanks!

BuZz

@yodajjh Don't use notepad - file probably has the wrong line endings - get notepad++ and make sure line endings are unix (LF). If posting configs/files put them in a code block so it's easier to see issues/mistakes and characters are not interpreted as styling.

http://commonmark.org/help/

yodajjh

@BuZz ,

That cleared it up. Thanks so much for your help!!!

josete2k

You can also disable the "wait for network on boot" and uncomment those lines in the config.txt file:

hdmi_drive=2

config_hdmi_boost=4

DD-Indeed

Sorry to bump up yet another topic today, but I've been trying to get custom splashscreens to work, but no luck so far, the splashscreen starts to jerk and cuts off before it gets to the end. I used this around 25 sec long PS1 boot video and added those sleep disabling lines to the autostart config, but it still does it. Has this issue been properly solved yet ?

pandapulcino

same problem here. i tried to edit autostart.sh with notepad++ like this:

while pgrep omxplayer & > /dev/null;
do sleep 1;
done
emulationstation #auto

the results is: i can play the video correctly, but at the end emulation station not boot, i just have a raspian terminal screen, no login :(
i use a raspberry pi3 b2, hdmi to hdmi on a full hd monitor.

Puritan007

@pandapulcino said in Video Splash Screen problems:

same problem here. i tried to edit autostart.sh with notepad++ like this:

while pgrep omxplayer & > /dev/null;
do sleep 1;
done &
emulationstation #auto

the results is: i can play the video correctly, but at the end emulation station not boot, i just have a raspian terminal screen, no login :(
i use a raspberry pi3 b2, hdmi to hdmi on a full hd monitor.

ADD &

I added it to your quote for example.

AnalogHero

Hi,

probably has nothing to do with your problem, but i had video splash issues too.

I have some leds on the gpio pins fading in on boot using wiringpi. This causes issues with the video playback because it outputs audio through hdmi AND analog.

I edited asplashscreen (omxplayer -o hdmi ....) and now it works flawless.

Acidnine

I resolved this today without having to delay emulationstation, using @herb_fargus advice above.

My resolution was to remove the -b switch from the omxplayer command in the file /opt/retropie/supplementary/splashscreen/asplashscreen.sh on line 35.

I did not remove the --layer option as, in testing, that put omxplayer in the background so audio would play from the video for the ES loading screen which would be foreground.

Too bad this command isn't a setting as it'll possibly get overwritten on update as all -b does is set the video background color omxplayer readme.

I understand this is a per-user/config issue as my computer monitors didn't have this problem, it only happened on every TV I tried.. now it works on both. I'd recommend making this command (or at least the switches) something configurable that could be preserved between updates.

moose

@Acidnine removing the -b switch worked for me as well! Excited cause I'm a noob but was able to get in and edit the file on the pi :)

My Setup:
Pi3 b+ (Canakit) running 4.1.12
2.5a Canakit power supply
Built from pre made image on retropie site (4.3.8)
buffalo snes controller
32gb Samsung EVO 95mb/s SD card
No modifications
Running on vizio TV