@mitu thanks so much for pointing me in the right direction. Wouldn’t have been able to figure this out without you.

Going to es_log.txt showed that ES was still trying to read images from the default directory

home/pi/.emulationstation/slideshow/image

One key difference that I discovered was that for some reason the ES GUI was displaying this pathway as

home/pi/.emulationstation/slideshow/images

The extra “s” on the end was responsible for the custom directory that I generated not being read.

(I had to build the pathway because it didn’t already exist.)

cd /home/pi/.emulationstation

Then

mkdir slideshow cd slideshow mkdir image

The “s” I had originally put on the “image” folder was why why ES couldn’t find the right directory.

After fixing the spelling, I symbolically linked the image directories that I wanted into the custom directory.

ln -s /some/file/ -t /home/pi/.emulationstation/slideshow/image

Boom. Fixed.

My slideshows now feature all of the scraped images and screenshots I have from my games.

I think it would be a great idea. If it's not possible to implement it, could it be done using the theme system? 🤔

@RedMarsBlueMoon said in Would the (ES) screen saver shut game off?:

Does it get cleared on restart? As I have rebooted several times since the issue above.

Yes, /dev/shm is a RAM backed folder, restarting would clear it. The file is present after the game is run and it's also overwritten each time a game is launched, so if you want to get the actual error, you need to get the file immediately after the crashed game stops.

@roslof Thanks for the tests. The random selection might have an issue, I remember looking at it some time ago and nothing wrong popped up.

This confusion happened over the course of weeks after I disabled the onscreen help. Forgive me. I've got some grey hair in my late 30s. :D

It's an omxplayer limitation on the Pi4 - if the upstream package gets updated and supports OSD (subtitles), then it will be supported if Raspbian will include the updated version.

@crash21 Yes, it should be possible, though it's not a single line change. EmulationStation's source code is up on Github, at https://github.com/retropie/emulationstation/.

@Clyde That would be awesome. I've written a script that will take a folder of videos and, using FFmpeg, overlay images on top of them like scan lines and a bezel and spit out a new video. It would be so nice to be able to do this as an image instead like retroarch does.

Okay.

It appears screensaver controls only work with videos - is that right?

Also, while it did initially work setting the screensaver to activate after 5 secs, it decided it didn't like it after a while, and it appears fine with it set back to the minute again. (I'm assuming the GUI not allowing me to go below a minute is something of a warning, here.)

So now my main question really is: has anyone used Skraper recently? It seems great, but try as I might I cannot get the video resizing to work.

For those want to testdrive the navigation (Joy-right/Select) and launch game (Start) also for the image slideshow screen saver -see suggestion 4 above- are invited to do so:

git clone https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation.git cd EmulationStation git fetch origin pull/673/head:slideshow-controls git checkout slideshow-controls cmake -DFREETYPE_INCLUDE_DIRS=/usr/include/freetype2/ -DGL=On -DRPI=On . && make -j 5 all ./emulationstation --debug

@joesnow81 well you have the sources, the wiki/docs and the helpful guys in this forum. A comfortable start position I would say.

And for another piece of learning:
This is the beauty of git, you don't have to wait for a fork or merge into master.
See my notes here on how to try the PR by yourself.

Didn't realise it was quite so simple. Updated to 2.9.1 and can see the extra setting within the screensaver settings. All working perfectly.

Should it help anyone in the future the steps I went through were

In emulationstation, go to Tools > RetroPie Setup.
Once in, select Update RetroPie-Setup script and select yes to update it.
Now select Manage packages, followed by Manage core packages, select emulationstation and finally Update from binary.
Once that's done restart EmulationStation

@mitu

Ah, I see, maybe one for the future.
Thanks for the reply anyway.

I discovered a little workaround if anyone is interested. It works for me because I don’t use video clips on my game menus.
Simply put the video you want to act as screensaver in a folder of your choice, and link it to a game using the metadata options. Of course that video will be displayed when you scroll over the game, but it will also be picked up by the random video screensaver.

@lexieye as i said i am very satisfied with the way i do it 😊. I dont want to have a PC anymore and as far as i can fetch every file i copied to "splashscreens" i got everything working by moving them with the Midnight Commander 😉

There's no GUI configuration at the moment, but you can use the scripting features in Emulationstation and run a script on sleep/wake to turn off/on the display - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/EmulationStation/#scripting.