Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi

herb_fargus

@fieldofcows I still need to find some time to test this out but when I was testing the gridview fork, there were some issues with theming options not being backward compatible eg if we used a gridview theme on the non gridview ES things crashed. Is that likely to happen here with nismos theme and if so is there something that can be done to mitigate that?

Nismo

@herb_fargus almost on windows the theme never crashed ES. Sometimes i was needed to "downgrading" ES version to test some commits from fieldofcows, and never crashed, simply the theme doesn't load if the version doesn't support some features, you know, on system view only black text and white background, and on simple or detailed view looks without theming, white background and black text, but no issues with ES.

Regards.

fieldofcows

@herb_fargus If you try to open nismo's theme on the current Retropie version of ES then you get a warning in the console saying "unknown tag 'video'" but the theme loads OK and drops back to the detailed view. Any <video> or <marquee> tags in the gamelists will be lost if the metadata is saved on exit though.

Nismo

@fieldofcows That remembers to me that i need to work in the detailed view of the theme, but actually i'm focused in video view and add more systems.

GtBFilms

said in Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi:

Make executable and replace the original ES

chmod +x emulationstation
cp emulationstation /opt/retropie/supplementary/EmulationStation/

Hi,

I got to this step (6) and on my install it fails, turns out this was because the directory doesn't have capital letters, also I didn't have sufficient permission?

So I used:

sudo cp emulationstation /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/

and it worked.

However got stumped on step 7, as I'm not sure what I'm editing?

I tried putting the oldroom theme (entire oldroom directory) into \etc\emulationstation\themes using WinSCP but don't have permission.

Sorry.

fieldofcows

@GtBFilms said in Looking for testers for ES Video Preview on Raspberry Pi:

However got stumped on step 7, as I'm not sure what I'm editing?
I tried putting the oldroom theme (entire oldroom directory) into \etc\emulationstation\themes using WinSCP but don't have permission.

Thanks for pointing out the error in the capitalisation. I'll fix that.

You're on the right track - using oldroom is what I would recommend is it looks fantastic and shows what the video preview can do.

Try downloading the oldroom theme to the home directory and then using the following command:

sudo cp -r ~/oldroom /etc/emulationstation/themes

GtBFilms

@fieldofcows Thanks for that, I managed to get a copy of the oldroom theme onto my pi now.

It appears as a selectable theme now:

But unfortunately when selected, it's a bit sparse!

I thought this might be a permissions issue so I went and chmod +rw everything I could find in /etc/emulationstation/themes but that didn't fix it.

The oldroom/mame/art directory contains:
bg.jpg
borders.png
scanlines.png
static.mp4
system_art.jpg
system.svg

...and the images look fine.

Ah, when I shut down, I'm getting a load of error messages flashing up briefly saying "Unknown element of type 'video'!"

Nismo

@GtBFilms No problems with the theme. That is the detailed view, that is not finished.

To get the theme working properly, you need to have almost one video for one game in each system, and of course the correct path in the gamelist.xml.

If ES detects one game with video then automatically changes to video view, and load the theme.

GtBFilms

@Nismo Ah, that makes sense, sorry for being dumb!

I'll stick some videos in!

Thanks!

Nismo

@GtBFilms Anyway i notice you select "arcade", there is no arcade system on my theme, in my theme there is mame system or neo geo system so change your settings for arcade system in es_systems.cfg or rename the folder mame to arcade inside oldroom folder.

If not you still no theming on arcade system.

Or simply copy mame folder and paste inside oldroom theme and rename to arcade, that way you still have mame folder and arcade folder.

The theme still work in progress and i'm concentrated on video view, that's because detailed view looks ugly.

Don't forget the paths in game list like this example for each game:

<video>~/.emulationstation/roms/mame/videos/1944.mp4</video>
<marquee>~/.emulationstation/roms/mame/marquees/1944.png</marquee>

Marquee is not neccessary for theme to work.

Nismo

@GtBFilms Also be sure you have the latest version of theme: http://www.mediafire.com/file/jzkfqe796w00qij/oldroom_1.6_720p.zip

You can see if it's the latest version opening with text editor themes>oldroom>oldroom.xml on top you can see version and must be 1.6.

Bluescreen

it works fine
i can´t find any bugs.
The only thing ist my pi goes overheating
The temperature at the video preview is 76.9'C

sorry for my bad english ;)

fieldofcows

@Bluescreen Thanks for testing.

The only thing ist my pi goes overheating
The temperature at the video preview is 76.9'C

Wow! What RPi are you testing on? Has it been overclocked? What codec do your videos use and what size are they?

GtBFilms

@Nismo

Thanks for your help, I now have this working on my Rpi3!

My problems were twofold:

i) I was being a dumbass last night and using the wrong SD card - which didn't have the updated version of Emulationstation on it - doh! (it was too late at night and I had had a few drinks, sorry)

ii) Using the arcade folder was still causing me problems, despite making a copy of the mame folder in oldroom called 'arcade', I got the oldroom theme to display, but it still wasn't finding the video clips for some reason. I gave up on the arcade folder, and just moved my ROMS to the mame-libretro folder as you have on yours, edited the appropriate gamelist.xml in /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/mame-libretro/gamelist.xml to add in the <video> and <marquee> tags pointing to the appropriate mp4 and jpg files (which I placed in a video and marquee directories in my roms folder) and it all worked!

Awesome work, thanks!

For the record, my rPi is in a case like this:

with a copper heatsink on the cpu:

It's not overclocked.

...with the case lid closed, it's running at 65 - 70 degrees centigrade when running the video preview system (ambient room temp is about 20C)

My video clips are all 240 x 320 clips from Emumovies.com

The whole menu is running pretty smooth, no noticeable pauses.

I'll try it with a bunch more roms and video clips over the weekend, my test setup has a smallish set of roms (about 150) that benefit from a 4-way controller.

Bluescreen

i use the x264 codec with 640x480 for all videos. I have the same case and no overclocking.
now with heatsink 65-70´C

Nismo

@GtBFilms Nice, i'm happy you finally you got it working, when I have time I want to make a little tutorial to automate the process for the gamelist and I want to upload optimized art that fix in the theme.