[SCRIPT] RetroPie Convert Videos

AbbaTheHorse

Hi there, this is such a great tool and thanks to all contributors!

I’m using a network share that holds all my ROMs for all my systems, however the folder names aren’t standard RetroPie folder names. In fact, many have spaces in them. RetroPie works fine as I have mounted the share and set the confige up so each system knows where to pull its ROMs from. However, the video converter won’t convert as, for example, my NEO GEO folder is

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/SNK Neo Geo AES/

When I try to convert a specific system and set that system to “SNK Neo Geo AES”, I see a message saying “Starting video conversion” but then nothing happens.

If I use the GUI and select a system, it lists systems like this

-Nintendo
-Entertainment
-System
-SNK
-Neo
-Geo
-AES

etc...

Can I get the converter working with my folder structure that contains spaces?

Thank you again!

ATH

hiulit

@AbbaTheHorse Well, it seems that you can't :P I'll have a look and see if I can fix it :)

AbbaTheHorse

@hiulit said in [SCRIPT] RetroPie Convert Videos:

@AbbaTheHorse Well, it seems that you can't :P I'll have a look and see if I can fix it :)

Oh wow, thank you so much! 😊

hiulit

@AbbaTheHorse :) although the best way would be if you just use dashes or underscores instead of spaces, hehe! Can't you?

AbbaTheHorse

@hiulit Hey, yes I appreciate that’s an ideal solution. Basically, I’m running the Wolfanoz 3TB build on my home server which is the source of all my games. If I change the folder names, that will stop working 😬

I fully appreciate this is quite a unique issue though.

What I’m doing though is a worthy little project, in that I have a Pi in a few different rooms that all pull ROMs from a central source on the network.

I’m just stuck on getting my arcade videos working, as the scraper has given me the wrong format videos.

I (and I’m sure everyone else who has used your tool) really appreciate your time and skill here!

Thank you again,

ATH

hiulit

@AbbaTheHorse I think I got it working. I'll release a new version soon-ish. I have to test it a little bit more :)

hiulit

I've just released RetroPie Convert Videos v3.2.0!

Changelog

[3.2.0] - 2020-07-28

NOTE: This release contains minor breaking changes. See the Changed section below:

Added

Support for spaces in ROM folders (e.g. /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/Some Path With Spaces/).

Changed

Now, when using the --convert-systems option in the CLI, the systems must be comma-separated (e.g. ./retropie-convert-videos.sh --convert-systems "nes, snes").

@AbbaTheHorse Could you try if it works for you now? Thanks!

AbbaTheHorse

@hiulit Wow, thank you! I’ll give that a try ASAP (might be the weekend, as work has gone a bit silly 😔)

Thank you again!

AbbaTheHorse

@hiulit Hey, just tried the new version and it worked great! Thanks so much again 👍👍

hiulit

@AbbaTheHorse Yay! I'm glad it's working! Everyone can benefit from spaces in folder names now :)

Clyde

@hiulit Some hardcore *nix users like a friend of mine like to express the opinion that spaces don't belong into filenames because they are ticking time bombs waiting for the next application that can't process them properly. 😉

hiulit

@Clyde I'm with you. I don't like them either. But hey, if some user needs something and I can make it work without that much of a hassle, I'll do it :)

lemonlimefx

Thanks @hiulit very nice script! However I'm still having some trouble with videos playing. As per the usual it is only with the arcade video previews. I had gone through my list of arcade games scraped with skyscraper that didn't play back and wrote them all down to try and fix. I eventually came across this script online. I used your excellent documentation and setup as follows.

--from -ces set to "yuv444p"
--to -ces set to "yuv420p"
--scraper set to "skyscraper"

Then I ran the script. Sure enough! it found all the ones I had written down and proceeded to convert them. I thought for sure it would fix the playback problem but, they still don't play :( I've tried playing them back with omx hardware acceleration and without, and neither work.

Any ideas? I can try to provide more information from the video files, but don't know what to provide. Thanks!

I'm running a raspberry pi 4, 4GB, on Retropie 4.7.1, with official raspberry pi power supply.

lemonlimefx

As is so often the case with not reading documentation fully, I had missed the part where the converted files would be in a new folder and have to be manually copied to the original folder and replace the old files. As soon as I did this it worked like a charm. Wow excellent script, much thanks!

hiulit

@lemonlimefx Thanks! I'm glad you find it useful! :)

It's not the first time that someone has had this confusion. I think I'll have to tweak the script to add an option or something to let the user overwrite the old video files, at their own risk.

Colombia20102018

@hiulit hello, is there a step by step video on how to do this? I am new to this and really eager to learn. Thanks

hiulit

@colombia20102018 No, there is not at the moment but I'll try to make one when I have the time :) What are you struggling with? Have you read the documentation? I think is clear enough for a "noobie"

Wasakawaka

Hey @hiulit I just wanted to thank you for your handy script.

I had a slight issue with the step listed as "--to-ces [OPTIONS]` (mandatory)" where it said to run 'ffmpeg -pix_fmts' and I didn't know what to do here but then I rebooted and the previous command worked for some reason. Lastly I had to manually edit my gameslist.XML files to include the videos for each of the games in order for the videos to show but that's probably just down to me at some point doing something I probably shouldn't have or not doing something I should have :) Works great, thanks again!

hiulit

@wasakawaka Hey, I'm glad you find it useful :)

Duel

1st of all great script. I converted all my videos with no problems. Question though, I'm getting an error when rebooting RetroPie. Illegal-Mpeg-Header . Here's a picture of the error code. https://www.dropbox.com/s/whgj075huoke8u6/img_20211201_075232.jpg?dl=0. Can you tell me what this means and how to fix it?