Lars Muldjord's Skyscraper no video

Drdave79

While using Lars Muldjord's Skyscraper, I still get no video previews on some systems. 85% of the systems have video previews, but some are random. In my Playstation or Dreamcast list in emulation station, for example, maybe 25% of the games have a video preview. Out of 500+ games. So it's not all or nothing. Of course I have video downloads enabled in skyscraper and everything's been updated.

Any other suggestions please? Thanks.

muldjord

@drdave79 Did it find videos for the games? In that case it's probably related to the format of some of the videos. You should consider converting them. I can't remember how to do that, but try searching around for a bit. It's been mentioned a bunch of times on here.

Lister of Smeg

@drdave79
I think a lot of scraping success depends on how well the roms are named hence I try to aim for no-intro, TOSEC or Redump sets (arcade sets are usually ok when built from the correct dat)
You can browse screenscraper.fr and see how closely your sets match up with theirs

Drdave79

@muldjord Yes, I did. For example, in the psx\snap folder there's 3D Baseball (USA).mp4. In the psx folder, there's a 3D Baseball (USA).chd and 3D Baseball (USA).srm file. I even edited the gamelist.xml file to make sure it all matched.

Still no video preview.

sleve_mcdichael

@drdave79 you can convert them with ffmpeg. If you don't have it already then install it with:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg

Put this script in ~/.skyscraper and make it executable:

#! /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

In the same directory, edit config.ini and add this line to the [main] section (using the actual script's name in place of scriptName.sh):

videoConvertCommand="scriptName.sh %i %o"

This will probe the videos on initial download and convert them if necessary.

It will not affect existing videos, however. For that, put this other script in /usr/local/bin (you'll need to use sudo) and make it executable as well. Then run it from inside your video directory (place it and chmod it using sudo; do not run it using sudo or the new files may have the wrong permissions.) Having it placed in /usr/local/bin means you can run the script from anywhere just by typing it's name, without the full or relative path. Existing videos will not be overwritten; converted videos will be saved to a converted/ directory. Move them one level up to use. Not all videos will be converted, only those in yuv444p will be converted to yuv420p.

#! /bin/bash
# Script provided by Clyde

mkdir -p converted    # create the folder "converted" if it doesn't exist
for f in *.mp4        # process all videos in the current directory
  do
    echo "$(pwd)/$f"  # show the processed file's name
    c=$(ffprobe "$f" 2>&1 | grep -c yuv444p)  # (-c)ount no. of "444p"

    if [ "$c" -gt 0 ]                         # if 444p is present,
      then                                    # convert to 420p
        ffmpeg -i "$f" -y -pix_fmt yuv420p -strict experimental converted/"$f"
    fi
done

Edit: your existing Skyscraper cached videos will still be in the original format. If you want to cache the converted versions, you can re-download them with the --cache refresh option in Skyscraper, after setting up the first script to detect and convert.

Drdave79

@sleve_mcdichael Thank you for those very detailed instructions. Quite a bit of it goes past my level of expertise here. I may have to download a fresh build and play around with this in fear of breaking my current build. This is pretty complicated.

Clyde

@sleve_mcdichael said in Lars Muldjord's Skyscraper no video:

Having it placed in /usr/local/bin means you can run the script from anywhere just by typing it's name, without the full or relative path.

Alternatively, you can put it in a directory bin in a user's home directory if you only need it for this user, e.g. /home/pi/bin for the user pi.

Edit: your existing Skyscraper cached videos will still be in the original format. If you want to cache the converted versions, you can re-download them with the --cache refresh option in Skyscraper, after setting up the first script to detect and convert.

Or you may convert the videos directly inside the cache. It's located in the hidden directory ~/.skyscraper/cache (only .skyscraperis hidden because of the leading dot in its name). There, the cache is organised in subdirectories for the resp. systems, e.g. arcade or snes, each containing a subdir videos, containing further subdirs for each scraping source.

So for example, if you saved my script as 444p-to-420p.shin either /usr/local/bin or ~/bin(~ points to the current user's home dir), and made it executable with chmod +x 440p-to-420p.sh, these two commands will convert all 444p arcade videos from ScreenScraper in Skyscraper's cache to 420p:

cd ~/.skyscraper/cache/arcade/videos/screenscraper
444p-to-420p.sh

After that, you'll find any converted videos in ~/.skyscraper/cache/arcade/videos/screenscraper/converted. Check them for playability and then move them one directory upwards.

(This post is more for anyone interested than for you, @sleve_mcdichael, as I guess that you already know all this. 😉 )

sleve_mcdichael

@clyde ah, I hadn't considered converting them directly in the cache. That would save the trouble (and the bandwidth) of downloading them again just to do the same conversion anyway.