Retropie Pi Zero W Video Enabled Themes with Snaps

[fnkngrv]

@pjft I have opened an issue with the developer of OMXplayer on GutHub and provided my findings so far. He is leaning toward the issue being EmulationStation itself or else whatever is in the current Retropie build image for the Pi Zero, but he is working with me to run it down and try to be sure.

[fnkngrv]

It would appear that the dev of OMXplayer very well may be right that it is not the OMXplayer that is the issue, but emulationstation itself as it hits the CPU hard at 85% when using VLC and between 70-75% with OMXplayer. I am not sure where to report this to for further troubleshooting.

VLC

OMXplayer

@pjft do you have any input on where to go next with this issue?

[fnkngrv]

I may have spoken too soon. I didn't have both ps aux and htop running at the same time. Now with them both running you can see that something is not right as well with OP as there are multiple instances open? Could it be that ES is making multiple calls for the OP process to run??

[pjft]

@fnkngrv Thanks for looking into this.

One comment: it'll be easy for you to test your hypothesis of " During this time the CPU does not drop which leads me to believe that the OMXplayer process either hangs or still runs in the background." by running "top" or "htop" (which you need to install separately) and see if, effectively, there is a leftover OMXPlayer process hanging there.

Looking forward to seeing your research.

It seems that VLC is unusable, but OMXPlayer still lags a lot while loading the videos. Interesting.

Thanks!

[fnkngrv]

@pjft said in Retropie Pi Zero W Video Enabled Themes with Snaps:

@fnkngrv Thanks for looking into this.

One comment: it'll be easy for you to test your hypothesis of " During this time the CPU does not drop which leads me to believe that the OMXplayer process either hangs or still runs in the background." by running "top" or "htop" (which you need to install separately) and see if, effectively, there is a leftover OMXPlayer process hanging there.

Looking forward to seeing your research.

It seems that VLC is unusable, but OMXPlayer still lags a lot while loading the videos. Interesting.

Thanks!

I'll see what I can find out and report back for sure. Thanks for the input!

[fnkngrv]

I do intend to provide further findings as they come along. I spent much of the last day reading the thread on the omxplayer project on github under reported issues and feature requests. It appears that the CPU spike and pegging is a known issue with OPand there have been those that have managed to debug and find that the process for omxplayer.bin actually shows up dozens of times if not more simultaneously. This makes me very curious to see if I switch my renderer to OP rather than VLC on my current stable Rpi3 build. From what I have seen this issue has been occurring for well over a year and multiple versions which makes be curious as to why it has not had much consideration by the developer. Most that I see have abandoned OP due to this for video and kept it strictly to audio playback or streaming.

[fnkngrv]

I have been in discussion with the dev for OMXplayer itself further and he is digging into it. Not sure if I have shared as of yet however my request on GitHub with him is below.

OMXplayer Issue 551

[pjft]

Thanks, and thanks for the research here.

Just to confirm: I don't expect this to be a zombie process thingie, as suggested in that bug report/thread. To the best of my knowledge, all child processes are explicitly removed from memory after the process exits.

Let us know what comes out of it!

[fnkngrv]

The last that I heard from the dev he was able to replicate the issues while inside of ES. His plans were to test outside of ES. I have reached out for an update.

[peter_shaw]

bringing this thread back from the dead, as i encountered the same issue on my pi zero. any updates?