Video Preview in EmulationStation

enderandrew

I would absolutely love to see a version of ES with both the GridView and this video preview.

Where do the video previews come from? Are they animated gifs from a scraper service?

Nismo

@enderandrew Not animated gifs, real video files inside a folder. There are a lot of places around the web where you can obtain it.

Regards.

enderandrew

@Nismo How much storage does it take for actual video files for all the roms? Video has the advantage of sound but I wonder if animated gifs would be more efficient.

fieldofcows

I have about 3800 videos and they take about 14Gb in H.264 mkv format.

enderandrew

@fieldofcows said in Video Preview in EmulationStation:

I have about 3800 videos and they take about 14Gb in H.264 mkv format.

I've seen several warnings that I shouldn't use a SD card over 32 GB with a Pi or in a RetroPi project, so additional 14 GB of storage seems like a lot for this feature.

I presume you're using something more like a 128 GB card. So I presume that must work for you.

CourierSS

@enderandrew

For over 32 GB, the difference is that you'll have to format the SD cards from exFAT to FAT32 so they'll be compatible with RetroPie. In terms of which SD cards actually work well with the Raspberry Pi, you can check out Embedded Linux Wiki - RPi SD cards.

fieldofcows

I haven't setup a card with all the videos on it. I think my current test setup has 850 or so on a 32Gb card. You should be able to use any video format or size that VLC supports as long as the rPI has the CPU grunt to decode it. I would have thought it possible to process the videos down to a much smaller size.

Nismo

@enderandrew Depends on quality of video, resolution, bit rate...

For example, I have:

1130 mame videos - 986mb
495 nes videos - 337mb

But i have converted the videos myself with high quality (slow) parameters to reduce disk space without loosing too much quality.

enderandrew

@Nismo said in Video Preview in EmulationStation:

@enderandrew Depends on quality of video, resolution, bit rate...

For example, I have:

1130 mame videos - 986mb
495 nes videos - 337mb

But i have converted the videos myself with high quality (slow) parameters to reduce disk space without loosing too much quality.

Would I be able to find video previews for most of the common systems?

And I know you can't link or share ROMS, BIOS or anything copyrighted, but if you've already taken the time to compress your videos, could you share them on a Google Drive or something like that?

fieldofcows

@Nismo Thanks again for testing the video feature.

I'll take a look at the following issues and get a new version built:

Video continuing to play when launching a game or going back to system list (I've already fixed this one)
Shoulder buttons not working - I can't see how the changes I made would have broken this but I'll have a look
Specify default image, or maybe default video if video does not exist for a game

I should have some time over the next couple of days to get these sorted.

Nismo

@fieldofcows Thanks for taking your free time to fix the code.

@enderandrew Since fieldofcows included video preview in emulationstation, i'm making a new version of my old video snaps with more quality. Yes, when i finish i could upload somewhere for who interested. Of course more quality means more size.

Anyway you can find packs for systems here: http://insertmorecoins.es/hyperspin-media-packs-actualizado-10-03-16/

or here: http://www.arcadepunks.com/download-hyperspin-video-media/

robertybob

@fieldofcows I downloaded the windows build but couldn't for the life of me get it to find any roms, ES kept displaying the message telling me to check es_systems.cfg and rom paths :(

fieldofcows

@robertybob What directory were you putting your config in? This version looks in %HOMEPATH%\.emulationstation

robertybob

@fieldofcows Aha thanks !

The 1942 video isn't playing (just a black screen). The plugins folder is a subfolder where emulationstation.exe is. Not sure what's going on?

I've tried to make my own gamelist.xml for GameBoy but having checked the ES log it's unable to parse the XML.
http://pastebin.com/hSr1kzwM

Nismo

@robertybob Be sure all your configs and path are ok, also to see video you need to use video theme inside SampleConfig folder, copy the video theme and paste on your themes folder, then select the video theme on emulationstation options.

Also the video theme actually only works for mame, i have a video theme with allmost all systems working but I need to do some changes and adjusts.

This build worked fine for me since first boot, only need to set it correctly.

fieldofcows

@Nismo I've built a new version with the fixes for shoulder buttons and video continuing to play when the view is closed. You can get it from here:

https://github.com/fieldofcows/EmulationStation/releases/tag/v0.1-beta.2

Interestingly, the page-up/down issue seems to be present in the retropie branch as well as a couple of others I've looked at.

Keep me posted with any other bugs/improvements you (or anyone else for that matter) want. I don't get much time but I'm enjoying this so I'll try my best!

Nismo

@fieldofcows Thank you very much, i'll test ASAP and tell you how it goes.

I've read in one Herdinger's post on github the first commit he did was implement --no splashscreen because was fast and easy, can you take a look at his code and implement it?

Regards.

Edit: Seems working perfectly now when you join a game, also it stops when you go to systems tab or quickchange system. Congratulations.

Shoulders buttons working good too. Congratulations again XD.

Only I notice if you have two systems with videos (x and y), and you're watching one video on "x" system and accidentally quickchange to "y" system and back to "x" too fast, you can hear both videos at same time, but it's not really a big issue because you have to do it too fast.

I'll test more tomorrow. Thanks again. Good work.

fieldofcows

@Nismo Seeing as you're being so kind as to test the video feature for me I've ported the no-splash option for you :) I haven't built it into a release yet but it won't be long.

Nismo

@fieldofcows Thank you very much, i didn't have too much time to test this weekend. i'll take a look these days and tell you if I found something strange.

Nismo

@fieldofcows I found another little issue, I don't know if could be easy to solve.

If you go down on gamelist and press a game, no time for video to start playing so the game is launched at the same time than the video and you can hear the video when game start. I think this can be solved by two ways:

Don't let the video start if game was launched.
Don't let the player launch the game until video start (of course only if the game has video).

Another option:

Try to launch the video faster ( I don't know if this is possible).

What are your next steps now? Are you working on something else in the code?

Regards.