Video Screensaver System Lockup

hansolo77

I know prior to getting the Video Screensaver running, I was using DIM and never had any issues. It was only after I started using this one that I began having lockups. And from what I can remember, every time it was locked up, the video was in the middle of fading out to the next one. I don't think it was on the same video each time, but it might have been trying to load the same NEXT video.

I did set the screensaver to DIM last night and after 10 hours the Retropie Manager was able to refresh. My log doesn't show anything new, except for a bunch more of:

lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!
lvl1: 	OptionListComponent too narrow!

The system was also able to recover out of the sceensaver just fine. I'm gettingn ready to leave for work, so I have it set to the Video Screensaver now.

TMNTturtlguy

@hansolo77 I believe those errors are all related to missing or non-playable video files that are listed in your gamelist but either don't exist in the correct location, or are not playable.

hansolo77

Could be... I"m curious how the Video Screensaver actually works.. does it parse your entire gamelist across all systems, then just randomly pick one as the game it'll play? Or does it pull the gamelist then test with if to verify a video exists before trying to play it? If it's just a blind "pick and play" that can explain it not working. The best way to resolve that would be have it test to verify a video exists first...I know there are a LOT of games in my lists that don't have videos. GBA for instance has an entire romset, but only like 4 videos. So if it's trying to play a video from that system, and crashes because none exist.. that explains a lot.

Oh, I'm home from work now. :) I can't stay up too late playing around though, I work early in the morning (uhg). But as soon as I could, I refreshed the Log page on the Retropie Manager and everything is still running. Turned on the TV and sure enough, videos are still chugging a way. I've got an SSH terminal up running top too, so I can see what was running if/when it crashes.

So far, it looks like this:
http://image.ibb.co/iKiSH5/Untitled_1.jpg

TMNTturtlguy

@hansolo77 the screensaver looks for all <video> tags in all gamelists from all systems.

It does not look at all games and then try to play videos. so that is not an issue. It looks for the <video> tags that have content. SO if you have empty video tags like this <video /> or like this <video></video> they will be ignored. If your game does not have a video tag, they will be ignored.

If however you have a video <video>does not exist.mp4</video> it will try to read this video and it will fail. After a set number of failures in a row, i think @pjft has this set to 20? he can verify, the screensaver will just turn itself to a black screen. When i was first testing this I was building my library and had a gamelist that had the wrong path to the videos, i experienced freezing when the screen would go black from failures, once i fixed the path, the problem was solved. If you use a pre-made gamelist that has video files listed, but you don't actually have those videos, this could be the cause of your freezing.

The best way to resolve that would be have it test to verify a video exists first

I disagree with this. The screensaver works nicely and I don't think we need to add complexity to it. Again, @pjft did a great job taking what @fieldofcows started and improving and implementing this. He knows the ins and outs of the build, but there have been very few users with issues regarding the screensaver, that is what leads me to believe it is either bad video files, gamelists with video tags that don't exist, or a hard drive issue with your build.

Keep the updates coming so we can get to the bottom of this. do you have an update to the retropie manager log? does it have a lot more of the same error?

hansolo77

I wonder then if there is a quick and dirty script I could use that just goes through and DOES report back does not exist. Should be fairly easy to do, I'm just not a coder. Have it do essentially this:

Load gamelist.xml
Check game in xml to see if it has a path designate for a vider
Check for existence of blah blah.mp4 in the path identified in step 2
If no exist, report the gamelist.xml with the error, as well as the game entry, and the supposed video that should exist to a log file
If exist or not, move on to the next game in the xml and test again.
Do this for every game in the gamelist.xml
Repeat for the next gamelist.xml
etc
When completed, I can read the log it created and see what it found. I can then replace the videos, or edit the xml to fix this issue.

Again, a simple bash script should be able to do that, I just wouldn't know how to write it. If somebody can do that for me, I can run the script and see what kind of results I turn up.

In the meanwhile, here is the current running ES_LOG:
https://ghostbin.com/paste/ry834

hansolo77

Had to terminate this little expeiment briefly tonight to continue testing the Mausberry shutdown script tonight. Pretty sure that's taken care of (happy!) so now I can devote another night of having the video screensaver running.

One brief thing I noticed.. The top I had running in the SSH terminal had locked up when I went into to try changing the script. Pressing CTRL+Z did nothing, as did anything else I pressed. I had to close the SSH terminal and open a new session. The system wasn't locked up though. I could access Retropie Manager, and the screensaver was still chugging away with 2 different videos at least while I tried to restart a session. So I don't know if having top running till the Pi locks up will be much help if it locks up itself after only about 2 hours...

pjft

So, there shouldn't be a problem with missing videos in the tags - I mean, the worst that will happen is that it will default to the Black screensaver if it can't find a random video for 20 times in a row or something. The video screensaver will randomly pick a video tag, check if the video exists, and if it doesn't moves on to the next random one. If 20 times in a row it doesn't find a video, it'll default to the black screensaver.

What may be causing lockups may be a specific video or so that may have a weird format or encoding. You may to well in re-encoding your videos with Handbrake or so, see if it helps.

I am not a script guy per se - a simple bash will be able to do it, certainly, though.

The "OptionListComponent too narrow!" messages relate to the popup menu - start or select - on occasion. Don't quite know what triggers them.

You may also want to try out the Black screensaver, and see how that goes.

hansolo77

OK, the Video Screensaver has been running all night last night and all day while I was at work. The forums here say it was 20 hours ago.. so that's a record for me. It's probably one specific file that's causing the lockup. I just wish I knew which one it was so I could fix it. With no way to test that, I"m out of luck. I'd still like to be able to see a log of what it's doing, so I can see if it DOES in fact run into an issue and let's me fix it. Right now, I'm not getting anywhere with the tools I have. When I came home from work, the Video Screensaver is still running. My SSH connection crashed:
http://image.ibb.co/hZMD9k/Untitled_1.jpg
If that clock was right, it crashed around 5:50 this morning. I say "IF" because when I run it now, it says it's 22:35, which would be 10:35pm, but it's only 6:35pm. So I think it's 4 hours fast. Takeaway would make it 1:35am last night. I was asleep then, so I don't know what it could have crashed on. Might it be a session time out? Like after 2 hours of no input it disconnects me?

The only other bit of help is the es_log from Retropie Manager:
https://ghostbin.com/paste/af8hw

hansolo77

Heading to bed... I've gone in and changed my settings in Putty to send keepalives every 1 second. I've also got top running with 1 second updates. Probably overkill, but it'll help me identify the exact second the terminal is halting. I also adjusted the system time to be in the US/Eastern so now it's the right time. As of now, I'm still running the video screensaver without any issues. Really kinda pissed about that because it's not doing it now and I can't identify something that's causing it to crash! The es_log hasn't updated yet either. One thing I have started to notice though is that every now and then there seems to be a large amperage draw on my power supply. I'm getting an occasional lightning bolt icon on my TV whenever it goes to load up a new video. It doesn't ALWAYS do this, so I'm not sure if it's happening on a specific system, or just randomly.

Looking at top though, is it normal for ``top` to be taking up 100% cpu?
http://ibb.co/gwAJaQ

hansolo77

Just got home from my early shift. Screensaver is still running. There must be a bad video or path somewhere, and it's just working like it should. I would have liked to have been able to figure out what the problem is, but now it's not doing it. I mean, what if it's crashing when it's trying to find a video for the 20th time and goes to black? I can't test it! But hey, it's working and that's all that matters. I'm not going to keep an eye on logs and top anymore. My bedroom is really hot now from the computer being on for 3 days keeping a constant watchful eye.

Here are the results of the SSH session. I thought setting up a keep alive would keep it from disconnecting. Must be something else that's causing the disconnect. Maybe it's related to the occasional lightning bolt icon, and the system is crashing but recovering with a reboot. The SSH disconnects, but the screensaver "appears" to be working because after rebooting it starts up again:

http://image.ibb.co/bCZP0Q/Untitled_1.jpg

Also, my Retropie Manager, while still connected, shows NO new lines added to the es_log, and those other ones it had before have also stopped showing up. I dunno what's up.

https://ghostbin.com/paste/u6x4z

pjft

@hansolo77 Yeah. You're probably better off running all videos through Handbrake, re-encoding, seeing if per chance it ends up fixing any odd one.

The connection dying on you is quite normal, depending on the software and the keep-alive settings for the connection. I wouldn't read too much into it. Maybe Windows is going into deep sleep mode and that's when the connection drops. The error message seems to suggest that it's PuTTy who's dropping it.

As for the ES log, this one in particular started at 23:46:24 , so it should help you understand whether that matches the time you booted it up, or if it might have really restarted. Your PuTTy log also suggests that the session had been running for 22h at least, before the connection dropped.

Might also be helpful, if the date doesn't match what you expected, to check whether the date on your Pi is actually correct, as the Pi does not have an internal clock and reads the date from the internet, and adjusts based on the time zone you have set for your Pi. Easiest way to check is, when you go to the terminal or log in via SSH, to check the time it shows you and see if it matches your current time.

hansolo77

I'm spending the day today rebuilding my rom drive. I've got a backup made now so if anything happens I can always restore it. Not sure what's going on.

hansolo77

I'm gonna hijack my own thread to report a new problem.

Because I had to reinstall from scratch my PiStation project, I've noticed a problem with the Video Screensaver now only playing the same video over and over. If I press SELECT to initiate the screensaver, it will choose a random video to start, but then when the video is over it repeats rather than picking another one. If I press SELECT again, it will THEN go on to a different video. Also, I set my screensaver to start after 1 minute, but it never starts.

I installed and updated from source the core components, which includes ES. I also did an underlying kernel update, so maybe something there is wonky?

ES v 2.5.1RP

pjft

@hansolo77 there's a bug with the power savings changes that were recently introduced that's being addressed right now.

If you go to the start menu there'll be a place (maybe under other options?) where you have power savings. Just disable them.

hansolo77

Yeah I noticed those. I just left them at the default settings. I will try to disable them.