Video Preview in EmulationStation

hansolo77

I'm a little crazy when it comes to building my Retro systems. I feel like I need to have EVERYTHING I can get. So to that end, I currently have 32 systems on my RetroPie. Are there any plans to update the default Carbon theme to allow videos? If not, can somebody recommend a theme that will work with a lot of systems, without getting that "White Screen of Death"?

ebtalk

@hansolo77 look at the Pixel thread. That is working for me and is being updated as well

hansolo77

Yeah, but I'm not a fan of the pixelation. :)

Nismo

@hansolo77 I think there is any theme free of "white screen of death".

I have read that even simple default theme has that.

And yes, pixel and metapixel themes have amazing amount of systems.

hansolo77

I'm using the Carbon theme, which is the default, and it hasn't hit me with the White Screen. But when I tried using a few of the others, as soon as ES finished loading, all I had was the White Screen, so I can't use them.

Nismo

@hansolo77 As far I know, simple theme is default theme for emulationstation...

lilbud

@Nismo carbon is the default theme, due to it being light on memory usage.

robertybob

@lilbud

Maybe he's referring to the Windows standalone Emulationstation as opposed to the RetroPie fork? In which case, he'd be correct.

Rookervik

@hansolo77 Once I get me an SD card with the latest Retropie build on it, I will finish the big Pixel update, and then add video to the official Carbon Theme. So long as Video support is included in the Retropie branch of ES. If not, then I can't even test it to see if it works. I won't release a default theme without actually testing it on the Pi.

jdrassa

@Rookervik I submitted a pull request this morning to add video support to the Carbon theme.

Rookervik

@jdrassa Ooh, so I might not have to do it myself. That would be nice if it all works out. :D

Nismo

@robertybob @lilbud @hansolo77 I mean standalone version of emulationstation even for windows, Debian or Arch , simple theme is default theme made for emulationstation.

When you speak about retropie, keep in mind that retropie is a "mix" of emulationstation and retroarch, and retropie developers maybe used carbon theme for betters results, but it's not the default theme from emulationstation.

Standalone emulationstation only includes simple theme.

http://www.emulationstation.org/#download

@Rookervik If i have some time, maybe i can do the video thing for carbon theme, but i only can test it on windows.

alphatoanant

Thank you so much @fieldofcows and @Nismo - this is awesome

Your changes made to ES to add video (fieldofcows) and the oldroom companion theme (Nismo) has helped me start up a build of my first theme and learn something new. Also kudos to @mattrixk for his well-written theme tutorial - it's fantastic and is making the creation process nice and easy.

@Nismo I was wondering if I could ask to use the static.mp4 fallback video from your oldroom theme in the theme I am building now? I would provide appropriate credit and just wanted to see if that would be ok.

Nismo

@alphatoanant I'm glad to help people make this project better.

No problems you can use what you need.

But don't forget i'm still working on the theme, i have a few new systems added XD.

hansolo77

Is there a wiki page, or a documented list, as to what themes are available that support videos at this time? I think we should have a centralized location. Or at least update the RetroPie-Setup scripts to include an indication of video support.. such as:

Carbon
Carbon_v4 (Kid)
Carbon (Video)

jdrassa

@hansolo77 to my knowledge none of the themes that can be installed through the RetroPie-Setup scripts have video support. There is another thread in going on about the best way to update the themes without negatively effecting users who have not updated emulation station.

buzzyc

Hi,
Am I dreaming if I think video support should work smoothly on an RPi Zero?
I'm currently testing @Nismo 's oldroom theme on it, and while it looks gorgeous, the video previews play at less than 1FPS

Is there anything I'm inherently doing wrong? I'm currently running ES 2.1.2 official, not the fieldofcows fork

Thanks in advance!

alphatoanant

@buzzyc I started testing on a pi-zero and found the same as you today. The Zero may not be powerful enough to handle playback.

@fieldofcows imagining there might be some people that share their gamelists between a pi-zero and a pi2/3 do you think it would be reasonable to create pi-zero specific themes that set <delay> for the md_video property to a high enough number (like a few hours) so that video just doesn't start playing on the zero? I have been experimenting with that this evening and it seems like it helps with performance in ES on the zero when using themes with gamelists that have the video property.

Alternatively, would it be possible to add a setting to the md_video property to allow a theme to not render video at all? I know it sounds odd as the intent is to play video but it might help with creating pi-zero specific themes for people that have video metadata in their gamelists.

I am thinking through it still but wanted to see what you thought. Thank you for any help.

buzzyc

@alphatoanant

It's good to hear at least I wasn't alone in the issue. I was going to ask on your YouTube video RE: CRT if you had been testing that on your zero or not.

One thing I did note was it doesn't appear to be the video itself causing the slowdown. I tested with both the CRT and oldroom theme, and the simple act of adding <video> tag in the gamelist without even having a path pointing to something caused slowdown, even with the static.mp4 video disabled too.

It's most notable when you choose the system. That without the <video> tag loads quite quickly, whilst the <video> tag system (NES in this case) has a noticeable delay before it goes into gameslist view.

Something additional too, I notice that if there is no <video> tag, the <marquee> tag doesn't appear to work. Is that by design? I couldn't seem to make it work no matter how I edited the themes. I was hoping that in the oldroom theme for instance the <image> could be the screenshot and the <marquee> the boxart.

I tried searching if there were other image related tags I could use but came up empty, unless I can just make any <md_imagesomething> and add the extra=true suffix?

Again, thanks for all the help and I am loving both the video theme on my Debian build and all the themes in this thread :)

Nismo

@buzzyc I'll try to explain to you, there are 4 views right now:

system view
basic view
detailed view
video view

If there is not video tag, then the video view (that is the only with marquees support) is not loaded, so that is because marquees doesn't work without video tag.

I was speaking with @fieldofcows about adding marquees support to detailed view, and I suposse it's in his "to do" list, but he is very busy doing a lot of other things.

About the pi zero gamelist slowdown problem, maybe when he finish his new metadata management maybe it can be solved, because the intention it's to manage gamelists faster, we need to wait the release and help him to test it.

Regards.