Video previews paths

Clinkers

Hi,

I'm new to the RetroPie scene, but Ive been using emulators for many years now.

I've a Pi3, running RetroPie 4.2 and Emulationstation (set up following ETA Prime on youtube)

I have my gamelists all sorted, going through the gameslists and removing games I didn't want, which took several nights when it came to Mame!

I've set up Atari2600, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, NES, SNES, MAME (libreto, I think that 's Mame 2003?) and Amstrad CPC.

All the systems run the games perfectly (except Neo Geo, but I'll tackle that another day), the hassle I'm having is the video previews. I used the Stephen Selph scraper, and the NES, SNES and Atari 2600, Gameboy and GBA videos all work fine. I cant get the videos to work for Mame or Amstrad CPC, though.

I've tried putting the videos in a folder called (images) in the ROM folder, which is how the other emulators are all set up, and made sure that the names match the rom names exactly, and I've tried manually typing the path in when I edit the metadata for the game in Emulationstation, but I've had no success.

Can anyone tell me where I can edit the path for the video preview: I've looked but I can't see them.

I did try to scrape the videos again, but it mucked up all my gameslists so I REALLY don't want to try that again!

I had one issue with the Atari 2600, when I scraped the videos. Yar's Revenge showed up as Custer's Revenge (that's a totally different kind of game, lol!), but I managed to hunt my way around configs and gamelists and edited the metadata for Yars Revenge so that plays correctly now.

EDIT: I had another look at this for the last couple of hours to make sure I hadnt missed anything obvious. I re-scraped using the Stephen Selph scraper, and as before, pretty much all of the names of my MAME roms have reverted baCK (with World, Japan, etc at the end of the names). Some images did scrape (only about 30 or so) but no videos. To test, I renamed the Asteroids video as Asteroi1-video.mp4 (matching Asteroi1-image.jpg that had scraped) and put in images folder with scraped image.
Restarted Emulationstation - no video
Restarted system - no video

What I did notice, once I edited and saved the metadata (even if I didn't add the video path) the IMAGE that had scraped no longer worked, either.

I removed the image path from the metadata, restarted (ES and system) and still no image or video.

If I leave the video path I have typed in place, and scrape using the menu (instead of quitting ES and going through the Stephen Selph scraper) I can choose between two different image that get pulled down from the web, but this then deletes the video path I typed.

Thanks

DJ Wheels

I'm having a similar issue and can't seem to find any documentation on it. I've spent hours looking. I have my video previews working for several other systems but Arcade (Mame2003) I can't get them to cooperate. Not sure if it makes a difference but I am transfering vidoe previews that I used with hyperspin. I have tried mp4 files and flv and tried placing in 2 different folders. First I tried /home/pi/retropie/roms/arcade/images which was the path i used for the other emulators. I also tried /opt/retropie/configs/all/downloaded_images/arcade. Help!

mitu

@dj-wheels The configuration of video previews is more than just copying the video files, you need to modify the gamelist files used by Emulationstation to show the media and add the path to those files to each game.
The gamelist files are in the /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists folder, each system has it's own gamelist.xml file (e.g nes, arcade, etc). The gamelist XML file is an organized list of games, with information about each game, including the path to the image and video associated with the game. See https://retropie.org.uk/docs/EmulationStation/#scraper for more details about the format of these files.
In order for the video previews to show, you need to modify these XML files and add the path to your video for each game.

pickaxpete

I was just having this same issue over the weekend. MAME and FBA gamelists had the video snaps had the correct path. I turned off OMX player and found all the MAME and FBA video would worked. I came across some posts saying they needed to be re-encoded to work with OMX player. I downloaded handbrake, copied my MAME and FBA snaps to my pc and encoded them, copied them back and was good. It took a few tries, mainly I've never used handbrake and had to figure out the batch encode and it was adding a numeric suffix to the names and a few other minor settings. For example, Asteroi1-video.mp4 would be named Asteroi1-video-24.mp4. Once I figured how to chop that number value out of the batch process, it was good.

I can try to post some links if I comes across it or do a quick write-up on settings I used maybe tonight. That was the one thing people weren't posting. They'd just say used a preset but there are so many presets in handbrake.

Like mitu said the gamelist video path needs to be there. The sselph scrapper should have worked if you enabled video preview in the scrapper settings. I'm still new to all this so I'm no expert but it at least worked for me that way.

Actually, here are 2 posts I got good info from. Some people do tell you their setting they used to encode. The one post shows the MAME and FBA snaps codec format is 4:4:4 and won't work with OMX but the re-encoded is 4:2:0 and works. Some were installing handbrake on the PI, I ended up using the desktop version for mine. It was fast to do.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/73frxa/omx_player_kills_my_mame_video_previews/

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12210/neo-geo-and-arcade-not-showing-video-previews-steven-selph-scraper/19

Heres a handbrake link to remove the {title}suffix so -24 in my example. In prefs/output, format is set to {source}{title}, you just need to delete {title} and will not suffix the video name essentially breaking your gamelist path because of a new file name.

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/automatic-file-naming.html

Also, just make sure you stay with .mp4, mine kept writing them a m4v til I set it up right. Otherwise you'd have to modify gamelist to reflect a new file extension. I didn't feel like spending the time to do that. Video snap sound isn't working for me, did with OMX off I think but I'm fine with it for now. Hope this helps.

DJ Wheels

@mitu thanks for responding. I'm not disputing anything you have said, but up to this point I haven't had to use scraper to download videos for the systems I have running (Atari 2600,Atari 7800,Nes and Daphne) nor did I have to modify the gameslists. I would rather not use scraper if I don't have to, especially since I already have all the videos I need. I simply put the roms in their proper folder and videos in their folder and everything has worked to this point. This is the way I learned from various tutorials and forums. I also noticed my gameslists file for Atari 2600 only lists 9 games but I have about 75 roms all working with their respective videos in Emulationstation. Why is Mame any different?

@pickaxepete thanks for the info. I tried disabling omx player but the Mame videos still didn't play.

pjft

@dj-wheels it's not that MAME is different in any way. It was explained in another post somewhere, but some of the sources for MAME videos encoded then with the fault MAME video encoding coded which is actually not supported by OMX player.

As such, if you're getting those videos they won't work without re-encoding.

Edit: unless you're referring to the paths. That I can't really comment on.

Clyde

@pjft said in Video previews paths:

As such, if you're getting those videos they won't work without re-encoding.

… which can be done, among other ways, by a simple script by me or a more sophisticated one by @hiulit.

DJ Wheels

Thanks guys! I got the Mame videos working. I copied my mame xml file over from my hyperspin folder and I used the scraper because I didn't feel like re-encoding. I also had to turn off the OMX player (HW accelerated) again.

DJ Wheels

Ugh. After adding a few more systems the videos started to lag and freeze. I tried encoding with handbrake, but they look horrible. All of this scripting stuff is a bit over my head. I think I'm just going to delete the arcade/mame videos, turn the OMX player back on and be content with static images for Mame for now.

pjft

@dj-wheels Hi.

Don't give up.

This post may have some useful settings for the videos:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11131/what-is-the-best-video-preview-resolution/4

VLC will indeed end up lagging and/or overheating depending on the resolution.

Handbrake usually does a great job, have you tried doing it on your desktop with the application GUI, instead of the command line version? Using one of their presets - even the 640x480 one - works well.

DJ Wheels

@pjft
Thank you. Those setting seem to be working very well so far with the decoding!

wcndave

@mitu You really need to edit the list and add video tag for every game? You can't just say "all my videos are in /roms/snes/snaps/$name.mp4 ?