Video snaps crash and freeze Rpi3

Chito

I used http://screenscraper.fr/ to scrap my roms. I'm using the mini Snes theme. In that theme when you scroll to a game, it shows the box art for a second or two and then shows the video preview. Most of the time it handles it fine but every now when a video snap is being played it will crash and freeze my Pi. it's at random as far as I can tell.

I read somewhere it was because the video frame rate wasn't 30. so I converted them all and it still crashes, then I thought maybe its because it's overheating but it can happen on the first snaps I view on first boot up. maybe its the codec? im using h.264. someone mustve also had this isssue

mitu

@chito Try switching to omxplayer for video snaps, it has hw accelerated playback and should be less taxing on the CPU and play with the the VRAM setting in ES - 80 mb seems to be a good start.

Chito

@mitu Thanks mitu. I cant find anything on how to get the video snaps to use omxplayer. how do i set that up?

mitu

@chito There is a setting to toggle in EmulationStation's menu, under Other Settings -> Use OMX Player (HW accelerated).
You can also find the VRAM limit setting there.

Chito

@mitu lifesaver! ill try it out tonight.

Chito

Worked like a treat thanks heaps. Now i have to take care of the audio in the vids. I have music playing while you navigate ES do you know if there is a way to mute the video-snaps?

mitu

@chito Glad you got it sorted out.
For the volume part - it seems omx player doesn't have a config file to pre-set the playing options, but what you could do is to edit the /usr/bin/omxplayer shell script and add manually the volume level. Somewhere on line 67

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$OMXPLAYER_LIBS${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" $OMXPLAYER_BIN "$@"

replace with

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$OMXPLAYER_LIBS${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" $OMXPLAYER_BIN --vol -5000  "$@"

This will decrease the volume for the omx player played media. The downside is that the change is global, so if you'd like to use omx player for other files, you'd have to manually override that parameter (--vol). Also, when the distro's package for the player will be updated, you might have to re-do this modification.

pjft

There's an option to disable video audio in the Sound Settings.