OMXPlayer Laying over Theme images

[Wizzykin]

Quick question - I tried the default video player and it was too choppy, so I found some people saying to enable the OMXPlayer instead. It runs great - but it has one annoying problem. When it loads up, it becomes the full square player and overtakes any images that are supposed to sit over it in the theme. So instead of looking like it's in the TV, or being behind the box art, it sits over it and looks tad tacky and makes some themes unusable (looks terrible).

When I disable OMXPlayer, it works fine. So it's definitely OMXPlayer related.

Curious what I'm missing here.

[pjft]

@wizzykin hi.

You're not missing anything, unfortunately. I can provide more technical details of you'd like, but OMX player will always render on top of everything else as it is a separate rendering pipeline to ES, so it can't really be rendered between different objects/elements rendered by ES.

VLC was rendered inside ES, but the drawback is that it was all software rendering, no hardware acceleration.

There were some attempts with little success to try to do the same with hardware accelerated OMX player, so this is the best we currently have - and likely will be, at least for the foreseeable future.

You may want to re-encode your videos at 480x360@30fps max and then use VLC. That resolution performs reasonably well on a pi 3 with VLC from my experience, though it may still lead to slight overheating after prolonged video playback using VLC.

[Wizzykin]

@pjft

Awesome - thanks for the reply. I'm still fairly new at this stuff, so I'm learning a bit. Putting together a box for a friend. I'll probably just stick with OMX instead of fiddling with video resizing. I'll just pick a better theme where the video isn't framed.

Thanks!

[pjft]

@wizzykin Not a bother, and welcome. There are plenty of themes out there to use that do not really need VLC to render well, so there's plenty to choose!