There are no plans to 'retire' the built-in scraper, improvements are always welcomed.

@iandaemon
ok great info I didnt realize that
thank you

@exarkuniv , sounds good…thanks.

Put this in your /usr/local/bin folder and make it executable with chmod +x <filename>. Run it from your video folder. Your video files will not be overwritten. New files are saved to ./converted; to use them, you must move or copy one level up to replace the original files. Repeat for each system.

You may need to install ffmpeg first with sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg.

#! /bin/bash # Script provided by Clyde mkdir -p converted # create the folder "converted" if it doesn't exist for f in *.mp4 # process all videos in the current directory do echo "$(pwd)/$f" # show the processed file's name c=$(ffprobe "$f" 2>&1 | grep -c yuv444p) # (-c)ount no. of "444p" if [ "$c" -gt 0 ] # if 444p is present, then # convert to 420p ffmpeg -i "$f" -y -pix_fmt yuv420p -strict experimental converted/"$f" fi done

@edillenback said in Skyscraper / Steven Selph's Scraper working on some builds and not others???:

@drdave79 Just wish I had better news for you. I'm still having issues with both command line scrapers on anything but my existing build. The built-in GUI scraper does work and isn't bad after I took @mitu 's advice of unchecking the 'user decides on conflict' but that won't help you with videos.

Has to be something about the build process on my end but I'm doing pure vanilla installs and still have no idea what it could be.

Have you tried Skyscraper?

Yes, I've tried both. Same result.

UPDATE: I was wrong. The Windows version is also failing with the same error. I thought it was successful but it was actually using arcadeitalia as the source.

FYI…the Windows EXE version still works so I guess I can at least use that for now.

@sleve_mcdichael
Thanks for your answer! I was trying to create the script and I couldn't cause I'm a newbie haha. But I figured out that I was using wifi + ethernet cable, I thought it could be the wifi connection, so I disconected it. After that I used the purge option and re-scrape again some platforms and it worked. Got almost every platform working, but I couldnt do it with nintendo 64, it just wont work. When I was scrapping, i got these error messages saying the servers were overloaded, but its okay for me.
Thank you again !

@emulatre71 said in Scraper not working when attempting to scrape games for descriptions and boxarts.:

I do have a question about those with bin/cue file formats for PS1. It appears like this because the folders are in the ps1 rom folder, I did not take the contents and just throw them straight into the directory because I like to keep things organized. Are they supposed to be in a folder with their respective bin/cue files?
You don't see the scraper/boxart info until you click on it, this is how they appear so far.

You can convert .bin/.cue sets to .chd using the CHDMAN tool, to clean up your folders to one file per disc (and potentially also save some space.) This will allow you to keep them all in the root psx folder without being too cluttered up with .bin's and .cue's. After this (you might need to re-scrape your games so it associates the new filenames), the menu art should again work as expected: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/CHD-files/#creating-chds-from-cd-roms

Then, for multi-disc games, you can rename the .chd's to .cd1, .cd2 etc. (to hide them from the gamelist) and use .m3u playlist files to clean up your game list menu to one menu item per game. Another advantage of this is on-the-fly disc swapping through the Retroarch menu, and easier save file management (one save file per game, named after the .m3u playlist, instead of a separate file for each disc named after the disc): https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Playstation-1/#m3u-playlists-for-cue-bins-or-chds

@jmcdra I must have fixed something. It works

If you're using the EmulationStation scraper, then press Select on the game you want to scrape and select 'Edit this game's metadata', which opens a dialog that has the scrape option.

If you're using an external scraper, easiest would be to leave your favorites in the MAME folder or just move then to an arcade folder and scrape the folder. You can then add back the rest of the games.

@mitu thank you, that was the problem yes

@mitu thank you as always! Will give this a go.

@crush
ah you guys are legends - thank you!

@goestohollywood This is specifically Skyscraper at default settings.

@mitu Sorry, that's what I meant, but thank you for clarifying. I'm thinking of trying again with a single emulator and see if it works. Does that make sense?

EmulationStation will use the gamelist.xml ROMs folder, if found, otherwise it looks in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists/<system>. The 2 files are not combined, just one of them is used, in that order.

If you enabled the 'Use Local Art' option in EmulationStation's settings, it will try find a video matching the game by looking under roms/<system>/media/<ROM_NAME>-video.mp4, so even if there's no video declared in gamelist.xml, it might still find a video associated with it.

In fact, what would be the best way to ensure that I get both videos and correct information into my setup?

Don't mix the scrapers if you want video - the internal scraper doesn't support videos so it might overwrite the video tags if you re-scrape with it. Use the external scraper and see which videos have issues - some arcade videos are incompatible with RPI's hardware video codecs and might not play correctly.

@clyde said in Scraper fails on PS1 .chd files where it succeeded with .cue+.bin:

I'm using RetroPie's chdman and Skyscraper with my PS1 and Mega/Sega CD games, and I have only one game that can't be scraped in either cue or chd form (Kyuutenkai: Fantastic Pinball).

Thanks for this, it finally forced me to figure out SkyScraper. OMG the SkyScraper output looks so much better than the default scraper, and it handled the CHDs like a champ.

Aha, I get it now.

My primary monitor is running at 720p. So the second display has to run at that aspect ratio as well. So since my second display is 1280x390, I need to scale up my image height by 1.85 for them to look right.

When I did that, it looks good. It doesn’t fill up the entire display, I’m not sure why. But at least it looks much better.

Now I just need to automate the whole thing somehow.