EmulationStation Video Choppy and randomly launching games
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Hey all,
First of all, great work on retropie, it's a gorgeous piece of software and I've having loads of fun playing my old games as well as customising it but I'm running in a small problem...
I've downloaded a few EmulationStation themes that allow for video previews and I've scraped my games from screenscraper.fr including videos. But when I enable a theme with video support, it shows very choppy video and then sometimes randomly starts a seemingly game, often not even from the system I was looking at. Has anybody else experienced this, and if so does anybody know the source of the problem.
I love the concept of video previews and I've seen it work in multiple youtube demos but so far I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.
Thanks in advance!
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I forgot to add that I tried updating all packages on my retropie to fix it but that didn't help.
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@ainmosni I am not sure what is causing the random launching of games, but the choppy video has 2 components to it. First, the VLC video player that is default to retropie does not handle the video preview too well. There is currently a PR underway to incorporate an optional OMX player that can handle the videos better. The second is that the videos you are getting off of screenscraper.fr are probably to big, you should use a program like handbrake to resize them to a resolution of no more than 320x240 @30fps. Doing this will help with the video playback.
Now for the launching, i am wondering if a few things are not happening. The VLC player when struggling to run video for an extended time can overheat your raspberry pi, this may be leading to some weird side effects? You also might be using up alot of your memory, that combined with heat....I am just projecting some thoughts. If you remove videos, does the random launching go completely away?
I would start with handbrake and reduce the video resolutions and start testing from there.
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@caver01 Ah yes, you're totally right. I read over it. Sorry
Pi Model: 3
Power Supply: 5v 2.4amp plug
RetroPie: 4.2.3
Built from: Pre-made SD image on website
No USB devices connected
Using a wii u pro controller -
@TMNTturtlguy Thanks, I'll try that! I love the look of your theme and the gameroom one but without the videos they both are just missing something.
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@ainmosni I want to put a 75% probability that the random game launching has something to do with the wii u pro controller. I have seen tons of posts regarding wii u pro controllers have random button pressess including entering and exiting games. I would search the forum for posts regarding your controller.
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@TMNTturtlguy Interesting, I'll take a look at that after I convert the videos. Weirdly enough, when I use a non-video theme, I don't have that problem.
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@ainmosni well that is a good thing! i am wondering if it is a combo of memory usage and other factors that are causing it to happen. Hopefully the smaller videos will straighten everything back out.
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@TMNTturtlguy Possible, I'll report back once I have some converted.
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@TMNTturtlguy So, I converted all my SNES videos to 320x240@30fps and it's works gorgeously, I'm now converting the rest of my videos to the same format. Now that that works, I still get the random game launches which indeed looks like random button presses. It seems to mostly happen when I get the undervolt icon from retropie, so I just ordered a better power supply. Thanks for all the advice, it's been very helpful!
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@ainmosni glad to hear that you have figured it out!
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@TMNTturtlguy Yeah I was naive enough to think that scraped videos would work without postprocessing. I'm now considering looking at the scraper to see how difficult it would be to add a transcoding option. Of course that would mean adding more dependencies to it, at the very least to libav.
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I had the same problem with video previews and the WII U Pro controller. Solved it by using a Logitech bluetooth-adapter.
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@TMNTturtlguy So I ended up writing a small patch for the sselph scraper after all, I'll just have to run the scraper from my desktop machine instead of the raspi. (And if I do that, I can also write all the files locally first so that I don't have to keep emulationstation shut down during scraping, which will be a nice side benefit). I also submitted a pull request to add this feature to the mainline scraper which people can see here.
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