Skyscraper not showing videos

[Drdave79]

Retropie 4.7.7 not overclocked.

I read the following post:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/21125/skyscraper-not-showing-videos?_=1617066448642

I followed the instructions. I updated Skyscraper via source. I exit out of Retroarch and go into the menu from the command prompt. Select Skyscraper. Videos are enabled. Select Gather Resources. Select Dreamcast and proceed. After it's done downloading (I can confirm as it scrolls that video was yes), I select Generate Game List and select Dreamcast. Exit and reboot.

Still no videos on 85% of the list. Just a handful show video previews.

[mitu]

@drdave79 Please post some details about your setup, as asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

[sleve_mcdichael]

@drdave79
You've already enabled OMX player, right? First guess then would be the videos have downloaded, but are in another format like yuv444p while they need to be in yuv420p (or at least that is one that is known to work.) If so, there's a simple script that can convert them for you when downloaded.

Check first: locate a game that doesn't show a video. Navigate to where the video should be, at:

/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/<platform>/videos/<romname>.mp4

If the file exists, check it out with ffprobe (may require sudo apt install ffmpeg first):

ffprobe "filename.mp4" 2>&1 | grep Stream

Output will look something like:

    Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv444p, 360x480 [SAR 1:1 DAR 3:4], 349 kb/s, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 15360 tbn, 60 tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(und): Audio: mp3 (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 24000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 64 kb/s (default)

See in the Video stream where it says yuv444p, 360x480? That's bad, we want it to say yuv420p instead.

Sounds like you? Good. This post on GitHub discusses the solution. TL;DR version after:

https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper/issues/222

The quick version:

Edit your /home/pi/.skyscraper/config.ini to include the line:

videoConvertCommand="videoconvert.sh %i %o"

Script provided by jgcobra on the GitHub thread:

#! /bin/bash
# Script provided by jgcobra

echo Converting video...
echo Source: $1
echo Dest: $2

# Check if the video is already in 420p format
c=$(ffprobe "$1" 2>&1 | grep -c yuv420p)

if [ "$c" -eq 0 ]
then
    echo Incorrect source video format detected. Converting video to 420p format...
    ffmpeg -i "$1" -y -pix_fmt yuv420p -acodec copy -strict experimental "$2"
else
    echo Video is in correct 420p format. Copying as is...
    cp "$1" "$2"
fi

Place the script in your system path or in /home/pi/.skyscraper and make it executable with chmod +x videoconvert.sh. If you want to see the script's output when run by Skyscraper, I think you need to put verbosity="3" in your config.ini.

I think this check/conversion only happens on initial caching of the video, so re-scrape your roms with --cache refresh to force a re-download and, for maximum efficiency, you can use --flags skipexistingcovers and similar to avoid unnecessarily redownloading those media.

This solved probably 90% of my problem videos. There were a handful that didn't take and I had to do a little extra fiddling, but this should get you started.

Don't forget to rebuild your gamelist.