Please test: Random Game selection/launch via Video Screensaver

Dominus

@pjft Everything looks fine on my end, I didn't have to change anything.

pjft

@Dominus good, sorry. It was quite late at night during our exchange, I must have misread what you meant. I thought you had mentioned that part of the theme had disappeared, but I can't seem to find any mention of that now in the morning. :)

Best.

Dominus

@pjft I just hooked my Pi up to my TV (Usually its on my computer monitor), and now my intro video and the Video Screensavers all go blank and off and on. I tried going into the boot/config.txt and forcing hdmi_drive=2 but its still having issues. Do you know what the fix is for this? I can put it in HDMI safe mode and they play fine, it just looks like garbage lol.

pjft

@Dominus should be related to overscan. Try to set disable overscan in config.txt - there's a previous post by someone else on that. Some particular resolutions and refresh rates mess up some TVs. Not much we can do.

Disabling the screensaver captions is also an option that others have mentioned.

Let us know if that helps!

Dominus

@pjft Yeah that worked! Thanks again! I will pass that info on to others who were asking as well.

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft please forgive me in advance for this question as I have been spending a lot of time learning other aspects of retropie and previously did not have interest in favorites and kids mode. Now that I have been deeper into the system and my theme has become more complex and robust I have started to think about favorites. Also add in the thread about the favorite folder and how to theme it as well as this new web based app by @kixut and i am now thinking more about it.

What i think i know (but probably don't)

it was my understanding that kidmode needs to be installed through the experimental package?
I have also seen that the favorites is an ES Build by @Zigurana, again forgive me as this might have been incorporated into ES somewhere?
your current build with omx and random game selection/video screensaver does not support favorites? or does it and am I missing something?

As I said, forgive me as I should probably do more research on my own to figure this out. Please do not take to much time to go into detail. I think the basic confirmation that i am looking for is that favorites is not part of your current build. Thanks!

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Hi!

No need to apologize whatsoever. Answers:

Yes, Kids-mode is a fantastic but separate ES fork that @Zigurana created a while ago. It has recently been rebased to match the latest ES builds. I was using it extensively before the launch of video support in the main ES. That has since been addressed, but as you know I'm using the OMX builds now.
Correct, same build. Had favorites and kids mode, as well as kiosk mode, random game selection... quite a few nice things! They are not in the main ES... yet. My addition of filter support has gotten @Zigurana to be motivated to bring those changes to the main ES. They are not there yet, but they are in progress, though still no ETA.
Correct yet again. fieldofcows' build was a fork of the main RetroPie ES, so it didn't have favorites and kids mode support. At one point I was considering merging Kids Mode into the OMX build as well, but thought against that, as it's already tricky enough to manage a single monster :)

So yeah: not present yet anywhere outside of @Zigurana's ES. Hopefully we'll have it in the short- to medium-term. Actually, you were in the thread about favorites, so you are aware of that taking place!

Hope that answers things.

On a side topic: if you update my ES version from the repository, it should now zoom in the Video Gamelist View. We cannot zoom to the videos, as the videos don't zoom, so I had to take some creative liberties there. We'll zoom to (in order of preference if they exist):

Marquee
Image
System Image
Video Location (though it will just show the background)

Have a great weekend!

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft Thanks for the confirmations! I thought I was tracking correctly but wanted to be sure! I am trying to add in some of the favorites features to the theme based off of knowledge of locations on the screen, I just don't have the heart to install another branch to test the icon locations right now!

I fully understand and appriate all of the hard work you and @Zigurana and others are putting into these amazing updates. Your OMX build meets all my needs and more, but I can't wait until all of these can be merged into the main ES, the system will be so robust....I can't even fathom it!

@pjft said in Please test: Random Game selection/launch via Video Screensaver:

if you update my ES version from the repository, it should now zoom in the Video Gamelist View.

What another awesome surprise, you have had some week with all your work. You better relax and enjoy your weekend! Enjoy the family and take care. -Best

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Thanks, and same to you!

A Former User

Unrelated, but is everyone here literally an adult?

pjft

@itsnitro

maybe

TMNTturtlguy

On a side topic: if you update my ES version from the repository, it should now zoom in the Video Gamelist View. We cannot zoom to the videos, as the videos don't zoom, so I had to take some creative liberties there. We'll zoom to (in order of preference if they exist):

@pjft Sorry for the delayed notes on this! I got sidetracked a bit. Very nice implementation. A few notes, but not issues:

This was something that happened originally before video broke it, but for me the zoom is just slightly to fast. It seems a little "Jerky", is it possible to slow it down just ever so slightly to make it feel smooth and not "BAM"
Exiting Roms - When exiting roms the screen/background/md_images and md_vidoes take a second to reload, so it looks odd when the zoom tries to zoom out and everything is rebuilding. What if we only zoomed to enter games, but then just faded or no effect when exiting a game? I can post a video if you would like.

I love the zoom priority! Nice touch.

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Thanks for testing.

A few comments:

I personally don't like the zoom animation myself, so I'm not the best person to comment on improvements to it. I could try to look into that, but I'm not fond of mixing two things, as others may like the current behavior and suddenly find it "broken" for them because of bundling that with a fix for something else. Let me think about that, but if I don't change it it'd probably be best to make a second request in the forums and see how people feel about that.
As for the second bullet, I noticed that as well. It's weird, though I suspect it's related to the texture changes I did to improve the scrolling and such. Does it also happen on fade?

Thanks.

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft First bullet point, i agree i could do without the zoom all together, it was just the zoom to the middle of the screen after video preview was implemented was terrible!

Second bullet point, on fade the meta data flashes a bit, but not as bad as in the zoom feature of slide.

pjft

Hi all.

Thanks for helping with this for the last 3 months.

All this work is now merged with the main ES branch.

Some settings will have changed, so you may need to go to the options menu (which have also changed a bit) and re-set them to your liking.

No more need to stay on a separate build!

Best.

pjft

@darknior Can you please elaborate on what you're experiencing and your setup?

I'm curious as to why overscan is not an option as I don't know a lot about it.

If you're comfortable with ssh I'll send you some commands to test if possible, or changes to the build.

darknior

@pjft At least try to make the volume slider also control the video volume as well.
No need to file a bug for that - but if you don't hear anything in this in the next few weeks feel free to gently remind me here. :)
.
Would love to know more and potentially test out a few different builds to see if we can at least mitigate it.

Ok excellent, if you want i can make some tests on my systems :

Old HD Plasma with HDMI 2 YUV converter
Normal HD TV with HDMI
HD Video Projector with HDMI

With and without Over scan.

darknior

@pjft Yes i know SSH and use it if it can help to make test

pjft

@darknior Thanks.

So, just for me to understand:

On each of those TVs, does it work or not with and without the captions, with and without overscan?

Also, why can't you use overscan on the plasma? Does it not support it? You'd prefer not to? I'm just curious - don't know much about it.

In the system that doesn't work with the captions, I'll ask you to login via SSH while you're in ES and try the following:

omxplayer --layer 10010 --no-osd --aspect-mode letterbox --subtitles <subtitle-path> <path to a video you have>

and

omxplayer --layer 10010 --no-osd --aspect-mode letterbox --no-ghost-box --subtitles <subtitle-path> <path to a video you have>

For a subtitle, you can just create a text file on the current path, named test.srt, with the following content:

00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:30,000
Testing subtitles!

Let me know if you need more detail here. I'm curious to see if anything changes between the two. The first command should be the one ES runs, for the most part - but if it actually works, let me know!

You can also test them without ES running, but that should work fine.

Thanks! Let's get to the bottom of this, or at least as far as we can get :)

darknior

root@retropie:~# omxplayer --layer 10010 --no-osd --aspect-mode letterbox --subtitles test.srt '/home/pi/RetroPie/medias/gba/videos/Advance Guardian Heroes (USA).mp4'
Video codec omx-h264 width 720 height 480 profile 100 fps 59.940060
Audio codec aac channels 2 samplerate 48000 bitspersample 16
Subtitle count: 1, state:  on, index: 1, delay: 0
V:PortSettingsChanged: 720x480@59.94 interlace:0 deinterlace:0 anaglyph:0 par:1.00 display:0 layer:10010 alpha:255 aspectMode:1

I have the glitch !

root@retropie:~# omxplayer --layer 10010 --no-osd --aspect-mode letterbox --no-ghost-box --subtitles tt.srt '/home/pi/RetroPie/medias/gba/videos/Advance Guardian Heroes (USA).mp4'
Video codec omx-h264 width 720 height 480 profile 100 fps 59.940060
Audio codec aac channels 2 samplerate 48000 bitspersample 16
Subtitle count: 1, state:  on, index: 1, delay: 0
V:PortSettingsChanged: 720x480@59.94 interlace:0 deinterlace:0 anaglyph:0 par:1.00 display:0 layer:10010 alpha:255 aspectMode:1

Same !

@pjft On each of those TVs, does it work or not with and without the captions, with and without overscan?

For the moment i only try on the Plasma, but i will try on others quickly.
On the Plasma it works fine without captions, glitch with captions at bottom of the screen only. Without Over scan.

@pjft Also, why can't you use overscan on the plasma? Does it not support it? You'd prefer not to? I'm just curious - don't know much about it.

Because i have the HDMI adapter to convert video to YUV. With Over scan i can't see all the image, i lost some part, more at left of the screen.