Adding codec to Retropie for snap videos that do not play

toto2000

Hello everyone, I got several romsets that came with video snaps that were not playing in Retropie 4.6/EmulationStation. I tried switching OMX player on and off and got the same results. I had to convert these videos to make them work.

But : this is not a long term solution. Why do all these videos play well on Batocera/Recalbox/Regamebox/+ other images, and not with Retropie??? I tried, they do work with these distribs.

Can't we make them work as is in Retropie, without converting? What's wrong with the codec? Can't we use VLC?

How can I help, what can we do?

Thanks in advance...

mitu

@toto2000 said in Adding codec to Retropie for snap videos that do not play:

But : this is not a long term solution. Why do all these videos play well on Batocera/Recalbox/Regamebox/+ other images, and not with Retropie??? I tried, they do work with these distribs.

Mostly because they're not using omxplayer or the hardware accelerated MPEG4 decoder present on the Pi.

EmulationStation has the option to use either vlc (via libvlc) or omxplayer to render the snapshot videos. If the video's codec is not supported by the MPEG4 hardware decoder, the video will not play with omxplayer.
The problem is that vlc has been patched - since 2018 - to use the same MPEG4 hardware acceleration via the mmal API. While this visibly improved the performance of video snapshots in EmulationStation, it also brought back the same issues - among others - that playing certain MPEG4 with omxplayer had.

So the choice is to either have slow (and CPU intensive) video decoding via libvlc (as alternative to omxplayer, which is HW accelerated) or convert the videos to a (PI) compatible MPEG4 codec.

toto2000

Ok, thanks for this detailed answer. So... how can we "force" ES to use libvlc? When I uncheck "use OMX player" in ES menus, it changes nothing and the video still do not play. Or do we need to use an "old version" of libvlc?

Thanks in advance....

toto2000

Ah, apparently these are patches for vlc and the libvlc (see https://github.com/RPi-Distro/vlc/commit/837804c5eb6ff127bb5a3f41c9ce9ed64b6db3b6), is it possible to include them in the VLC available in Retropie? This would solve all problems in the future: no need to convert, no need to downgrade, no need to switch omx player on or off....

mitu

EmulationStation by default uses libvlc, when you switch to omxplayer, then it will use omxplayer.

.. video still do not play.

Yes, because, as I explained before, vlc now uses the same path to decode videos as omxplayer.

Ah, apparently these are patches for vlc and the libvlc..

These are already included in Raspbian (and therefore RetroPie) and used internally by libvlc. Those patches are the reason that vlc behaves similarly to omxplayer.

I feel like my last statement from my previous reply was misleading - I was referring to the fact that if we force vlc to use SW decoding, then we'll lose the HW decoding advantage from the RPI patches added to vlc. Right now, we don't configure libvlc in EmulationStation, so the only option currently for those troublesome videos is conversion.

bluestang

@mitu said in Adding codec to Retropie for snap videos that do not play:

EmulationStation by default uses libvlc, when you switch to omxplayer, then it will use omxplayer.

.. video still do not play.

Yes, because, as I explained before, vlc now uses the same path to decode videos as omxplayer.

Ah, apparently these are patches for vlc and the libvlc..

These are already included in Raspbian (and therefore RetroPie) and used internally by libvlc. Those patches are the reason that vlc behaves similarly to omxplayer.

I feel like my last statement from my previous reply was misleading - I was referring to the fact that if we force vlc to use SW decoding, then we'll lose the HW decoding advantage from the RPI patches added to vlc. Right now, we don't configure libvlc in EmulationStation, so the only option currently for those troublesome videos is conversion.

Out of curiosity, what is the development path forward for 64-bit RPiOS? Omxplayer is officially deprecated in favor of VLC by RPiT so it looks like its VLC or die...