New "Black Screen of Death"
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@hansolo77 fade always runs smoother than side if there are memory issues, however i am able to run the comic book theme with a ton of videos and a ton of systems at 100 VRAM and slide transitions.
Automatic will allow the system to show video view if video is present or detailed view if no video files are present. Video forces all views to video, detail forces all views to just images even if videos are present.
Edit: how many videos do you have? It appears you are having memory issues when exiting the games.
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"TONS" of videos. a video for each rom, complete romsets for many systems. I'm on vacation this week, so I'M sure I'll have it cracked soon.
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@hansolo77 certainly reducing video size will help, as @TMNTturtlguy states. That being said, if you update from source now you'll be able to enable OMX player which may save you that trouble. That being said, it's certainly good practice to reduce them to 480x360@30 fps or lower for the Pi.
VRAM should be at 100, yes, and it did help, as updating Carbon from source as well. You may need to do this separately in RetroPie Setup as I'm not sure whether updating all packages updates the theme.
I'd try another theme as well just to narrow down where the problem might be.
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It's going to take quite some time to batch process all systems to get their video sizes down. It's a shame there's no easy way to automate it. I have to transfer the videos over to my computer, 1 system at a time, then go through and load them into a batch for processing. My computer isn't all that fast so it's taking about 2 hours just for Atari 2600. So for me to be able to test and see if that solution works will be a couple days at least.
In the mean time, I will attempt to update EmulationStation from source and see if the OMX player helps. How do I go about "enabling" it as you say. Is it obvious from within RetroPie's menus, or do I have to do some manual ini/xml editing? Also, how do you update a theme from source? As I recall, the current version I'm using I got as a zip I had to manually put inside a themes folder.
Thanks for your help though guys. We'll get there eventually!
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@hansolo77 OMX player should be in other settings or video settings within emulationstation.
I don't quite recall how to install themes from source - I believe there's an entry in RetroPie Setup, but downloading it from the GitHub repository and unpacking will also do the trick.
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@hansolo77 Themes are available through the retropie menu. Go to retropie and there should be an option of ES Themes. Select that and then you can install, update and uninstall from the menu. Or as @pjft has said, you can just download the zip from github.
Another suggestion. Since you are pulling all of the videos off of the Pi to downsize, save a copy to your computer or an external hard drive. That way in the future you do not have to worry about pulling them off to modify them. I have a copy of everything on my pi on an external hard drive. I can then modify them, delete what is on my pi and put the new stuff on. It is also a good backup.
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That's actually what I'm doing.. I'm keeping the original size and the resized on a spare drive in my computer.. that way if OMX player DOES solve the problem, I can just put those originals back.
I will attempt to update the theme after I get all the videos resized.
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So here's some interesting developments...
I updated EmulationStation from source to get the OMX update. That seemed to completely eliminate all the problems with the video playback I was having (green, pixelated, etc). It also fixed the ALSA underrun error I was having. I haven't completely resized all my videos yet. Only the Atari's are done right now. But N64 and PSX were really bad with the video corruption, and it's completely fixed now.
I also updated the Carbon theme. I still get the "black screen of death" when I return from games. I tested it on different systems and even tried the 4 other themes I have installed (although none of them have been updated to support videos yet). So even THOSE these, using static images, returned me to a black screen.
I think whatever fix @fieldofcows did to ES got omitted in the most recent updates, or isn't working anymore. It's doing the exact same thing it was doing before.
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@hansolo77 that should not be correct, but there's an easy way to test that: you can download and install one of the fieldofcows binaries and see how it goes for you, and report back.
Have you reverted VRAM to 100?
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Yes I'm at 100 VRAM.
How do I get and install one of the binaries?Who's Scruffy Looking?
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@hansolo77 in the thread you previously posted at, there should have been a link in the first post about how to install them. What build were you on beforehand? Version number?
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I'm not sure actually. I just blindly updated. :(
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@hansolo77 :)
OK.
What Pi are you on? Pi 3, I believe?
Could you do the following: after returning from a game and getting that black screen, could you exit emulationstation and check what's the content of
~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt?
Could you send it over?
I'm actually not on my pi at the moment, as I'm traveling for work today, but I'm thinking there may have been a new change just this weekend that may be causing this.
@TMNTturtlguy could you - or anyone else - update from source and test the same steps? It might be that this actually is more widespread after this weekend.
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@hansolo77 so I put just tested out my theory about you running out of memory due to "too many video files causing you to run out of memory". I created a system with 150 videos at 320x240 and then I copied that multiple times in es_systems. At 10 systems I ran ok, at 16 systems I started having issues with the video and other md_images not showing up on exit. If i back out to the main system screen and go back into the game select menu they are back. At 18 systems I started having a bigger slow down in performance than expected. Then I ran this same test on another pi with another sd card. I noticed much less slowdown, but at 18 systems the meta data images still loaded slower. All of my tests were using the comic book theme running a VRAM of 100, no overclocking, omx video player, videos at 320x240 @ 30fps.
I wonder if you would be kind enough to create a copy of your es_systems.cfg file and reduce the number of systems you are loading to test performance.
Edit just to clarify I did not update from source to test this, and I am just leaving home, so can't test now. Also note that he @hansolo77 has been having these issue prior to the updates pushed this weekend. I and others have been replying to multiple posts since Thursday or Friday. Thanks
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I will attempt to start this all over again. I'm still in the process of reducing the resolution of my videos. But I decided rather than try to fix this, I'll go back a few steps. I'm having another issue (unrelated to the black screen, rebuilding the kernel caused the raphnet north-west drift to return). So I restored from an SD card backup I made back in February when things were mostly working. I'm going to try doing an update to the installed packages WITHOUT updating the kernel. There might be something that got updated there that broke it.
As it is right now, restoring the backup has made everything go back to working. This was an image I made prior to scraping for videos, and obtaining a version of EmulationStation and Carbon themes that supported it. It works like the way it did before, static images, games load and return to ES just fine. Once I finish updating, I'll test again. I made a backup of my gamelist.xml files to a temp folder on my computer so I can restore them with the modified locations of the videos.
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@hansolo77 this sounds like a great solution! After updating to the latest ES from source I might suggest you add videos to just one system first and see how it runs. Then add videos to systems one system at a time. Doing this will help determine if your build hits a certain threshold of video data it can handle. Keep us posted and good luck!
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Success!!
It's definitely something in the underlying kernel that, upon updating, breaks whatever fixes were implemented into EmulationStation. I just went through a system-wide "update all installed packages", then moved over my backed up gamelists and videos. Then I went in and updated EmulationStation from source (the binary is still the previous version without the OMX player), and updated the Carbon theme. Rebooted. All videos show up fine, in full res, playing a game and returning to EmulationStation now works without a black screen. I will test a bit more, but it looks solved!
Lesson/Solution - Don't update the kernel.
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@hansolo77 great! Glad to hear.
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Now all I have to do is find a pretty theme I like rather than the nasty black Carbon.
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