What Is The Best Video Preview Resolution?

[mattrixk]

I've been scraping videos for my games and I was curious if there was an optimum resolution for the videos to run properly on a RPi3.

I've scraped all the videos with UXS from screenscraper.fr, and from the looks of it, most of the videos seem to be 640x480 @ 30fps.

I was planning on using handbrake to squash them down a bit, even if for no other reason than to shrink the file size.

In this post @pjft explains the difference between the OMX and VLC players. My personal themes have images over the videos, so I'll have to use VLC.

[lilbud]

@mattrixk What video resolution did you use for the ES Toolkit.

Sorry, but those videos look like crap.

[herb_fargus]

@lilbud they look like crap because they are re-encoding at a lower res. So even if they are 240p they look much worse as a re-encoded 240p from 1080p as opposed to a recording of the native resolution at 240p

Which is why i have been trying to find a good method for people to record videos of their gameplay themselves at native resolution.

I really do not understand these sites that are like oo 1080p! No. For any 2d game it will never be anything better than it's native resolution which is barely ever more than 240p. Personally I just think re-encoding something that never should have been 1080p is the wrong way to go about things if you want clarity.

[pjft]

If using VLC, in my experience I'd recommend not going over 480x360@30fps. Handbrake does a good job at that.

I set, in Picture:

• 480 x 360 storage size
• Anamorphic Auto
• Keep Aspect Ratio
• Modulus 8
• Deinterlace Off / Detelecine Off / Denoise Off / Deblock Off
• Cropping: Automatic

In Video:

• Framerate: 30fps
• Video Encoder: H.264
• Constant Quality
• MP4

I felt these work well in VLC, though if left running for a while I find that the Pi will tend to get to a point where it shows the temperature warning. YMMV depending on your case, cooling and room temperature though. This was the main reason for me to move to OMX Player, because other than the temperature warning after a while, it was perfectly functional.

You may try to go to 320x240, but I'm not sure if you'll get good video quality from downscaling larger videos to that (even though, in theory, most of the games we are emulating have a lower resolution than that... I'm just shocked/surprised/sad that there aren't that many sources of original-resolution-videos).

For arcade videos, though, I strongly recommend the ones at http://www.progettosnaps.net/videosnaps/ - which you can download in bulk, or one by one from their site, or if you're keen on scripting something, via downloading from the URL

http://www.progettosnaps.net/videosnaps/mp4/<MAME ROM Name>.mp4

Most names will be the same, but some won't as it uses the most recent romset and I'm not even sure they have all variants. That being said, these videos are at the original resolution which makes them perfect for me.

You might want to run them via Handbrake, as some may be encoded in a codec that VLC doesn't support (actually, I don't recall that being the case with VLC, but certainly some were encoded in a codec that OMX Player didn't play natively without converting).

Hope these help.

[fnkngrv]

Good stuff to know @pjft

[pjft]

@fnkngrv I am, unfortunately, referring to a pi 3 :/ I can't imagine how those would be for the Pi 2 or lower though.

[caver01]

I have a handful of emu movies that have weird dimensions. Most of the ones in question are vertical games that I suspect have non-square pixels (PAR is not 1:1) so they end up looking long and skinny. Are folks re-encoding these to a 4:3 or 3:4 when they come up? If so, VLC? What settings?

Oh, I see someone mentioned handbrake. I can give that a shot. I forget about that app sometimes.

[pjft]

@caver01 to the best my knowledge, OMX player respects the original video aspect ratio. VLC won't because... It's complicated.

Ultimately it's not as much about the resolution as it is about the number of pixels it needs to render. I'd the total pixel count (width times height) is similar or lower to 480x360 and the frame rate isn't greater than 30, you should be grand.

[mattrixk]

@lilbud

those videos look like crap.

Hah, yeah that was on purpose. I tried to get them as small as possible (file size) while still being somewhat able to see what's happening.

I didn't want people to have to download hundreds of MB of videos just to use them in the Toolkit.

@pjft: That's awesome info about Handbrake. Thank you so much. I'll give that a go today.

[Muntic0re]

usually i use VLC or OMX