[SCRIPT] RetroPie Convert Videos

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?

Duel

@duel said in [SCRIPT] RetroPie Convert Videos:

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?

Nevermind on this error. I've rebooted instead of restarting emulation station and the error went away. Thank you for this script. I've looked everywhere to find a fix for video snaps for MAME to play properly and this was it. Major props.

hiulit

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

pianoman72

@hiulit Is there a way to force the script to look in a specific video directory? Mine are in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/arcade/

sleve_mcdichael

@pianoman72 said in [SCRIPT] RetroPie Convert Videos:

Is there a way to force the script to look in a specific video directory?

No, it's listed in the prerequisites that you have to use the ROM folder:

Use the ROM folder for gamelists & images option in Steven Selph's Scraper.

Use the ROM folder for gamelists & media option in Lars Muldjord's Skyscraper.

You could use Clyde's original script that this was based off of though; that one operates on a single directory at a time.

pianoman72

@sleve_mcdichael Thanks
Here is the old script updated to use ffprobe and FFmpeg if it helps anyone

mkdir -p converted                         # create the folder "converted" if it doesn't exist
for f in *-video.mp4                       # process all videos
  do
    c=$(ffprobe -show_streams $f 2>&1 | grep -c yuv444p) # (-c)ount no. of "444p"

    if [ "$c" -gt 0 ]                      # if 444p is present,
      then				   # convert into 420p
        ffmpeg -i $f  -y -pix_fmt yuv410p -strict experimental converted/$f
    fi
done

hiulit

@pianoman72 I'll take a look to see if it's easy to implement :)

Lolonois

@hiulit Can you update the links in the OP as they changed over time?

Steven Selph's Scraper: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/#steven-selphs-scraper
Lars Muldjord's Skyscraper: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/#skyscraper

Thanks

hiulit

@Lolonois Done! Thanks for the heads up!

camcamkennedy

Re: [SCRIPT] RetroPie Convert Videos
I am not technical and honestly, github is confusing and scares me LOL but this script was EXACTLY what I needed thanks so much! My only recommendation is for absolute newbs like me to have an upfront callout that the steps are to:

Install the script
Run the program using those mandatory/optional items on the Pie
Manually update the video files using file explorer on a PC or other method

That last item was the only thing that stumped me for a little bit... was figuring out what to do after the conversion was successful. But your documentation does have it.. I just found it a little hard to find.

Thank you again, this was so helpful and literally was what actually let me consider my arcade build "complete because both the Mame and NeoGeo videos I had werent working, but now they are!

mrmadcatz

This tool does not seem to work with how skyscraper downloades images/videos to /home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/<system_name>/videos/

Any advice?

chriz74

Forget this tool. I tried it to no avail. Just copy the videos on your Mac
, install ffmpeg with brew and run this script

#!/bin/bash

# Directory containing the original videos
input_dir="path/to/your/input_directory"

# Directory where the converted videos will be saved
output_dir="$input_dir/converted"

# Create the output directory if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p "$output_dir"

# Loop through all video files in the input directory
for video in "$input_dir"/*; do
    if [[ -f "$video" ]]; then
        # Extract the filename without the path
        filename=$(basename "$video")
        # Set the full path for the output file
        output_video="$output_dir/$filename"
        
        # Perform the conversion with ffmpeg
        ffmpeg -i "$video" -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a copy "$output_video"
    fi
done

echo "Conversion complete. Converted files are located in $output_dir"