Sometimes My Videos Freeze

AlphaBetaPie

I'm using the Comicbook theme on a Pi 4, and I've noticed an annoying issue pop up. Sometimes in my video view, the gameplay footage will freeze about 10-15 seconds in. You can still hear the music just fine, but the video is frozen. The weird thing is, if I hit a button on the controller (that is not A/B), it jolts it "awake" and the video pops back to where it's supposed to be. I don't think it's the Vram in emulationstation, as I have that set to 500mb (just for lots of extra wiggle room). It's also sporadic, and it does not happen on every game on every system (and it even may not happen twice in a row to the same video).

Is this happening to anyone else or is it a common problem? I can't imagine why it would be isolated to just my setup, since I'm using a default theme with no changes and all my metadata/art is downloaded from screenscraper.

Any info is much appreciated.

AlphaBetaPie

Am I the only one experiencing these intermittent lags in my gameplay videos?

AlphaBetaPie

UPDATE:

I may have stumbled upon something. In the "Other Settings" it seems like turning OMX Player (with Hardware Acceleration) to "ON" seems to help. Not sure if this is going to be a long-term fix, but is there something about this option that relates directly to the gameplay videos (that maybe could help the freezing)? It seems to have cut it down significantly.

AlphaBetaPie

Update Again:

I know I'm just kinda talking out loud now, but I may have narrowed down another fix without having to switch to OMX player. It would appear that turning power saving mode off can also allow the default video player to work without freezing.

Anyone care to give insights into this? I'm curious as to why and how it's affecting it. I have flipped it off and on several times, and the issue goes and comes with those tests.

sleve_mcdichael

@AlphaBetaPie said in Sometimes My Videos Freeze:

Update Again:

I know I'm just kinda talking out loud now, but I may have narrowed down another fix without having to switch to OMX player. It would appear that turning power saving mode off can also allow the default video player to work without freezing.

Anyone care to give insights into this? I'm curious as to why and how it's affecting it. I have flipped it off and on several times, and the issue goes and comes with those tests.

Power saving disables redndering of redundant frames after the description or title has scrolled once (or, instantly, or never):

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/172

Is that when the freeze occurs?

AlphaBetaPie

@sleve_mcdichael said in Sometimes My Videos Freeze:

@AlphaBetaPie said in Sometimes My Videos Freeze:

Update Again:

I know I'm just kinda talking out loud now, but I may have narrowed down another fix without having to switch to OMX player. It would appear that turning power saving mode off can also allow the default video player to work without freezing.

Anyone care to give insights into this? I'm curious as to why and how it's affecting it. I have flipped it off and on several times, and the issue goes and comes with those tests.

Power saving disables redndering of redundant frames after the description or title has scrolled once (or, instantly, or never):

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/172

Is that when the freeze occurs?

This seems exactly right. I just never noticed the correlation between the description scrolling and the freeze. After it scrolls once, that is pretty much when the video freezes each time (can vary, but ballpark). This is why it would seem turn ing PS mode off stops this. So very good info!

I will say this line seems to conflict with what we already know: "PS is disabled while running Videos through VLC." If you have to turn OMX on, wouldn't VLC be the video player by default? And we know it does not disable the freezing unless we manualy turn it off. But other than that, it seems all good now!