Video View For All Themes

Nismo

@fieldofcows Yeah I imagine that, we need to separate views in order to place the "version" tag. It's a little bit more work but that way we can have the compatibility we are looking for...

Nismo

So I think if finally we use the "version" workaround, the themes uploaded to github must be backward compatible so no problems for anybody...

fieldofcows

I've made the change to my ES to support the <version> tag to try it out and it works fine. I've set the current version of the theme to '4' whereas the non-video ES uses version '3'. This means this code works on the video supported ES (with my fix which is currently not in the RetroPie fork) but is ignored on older versions of ES:

<version minimum="4">
   [video config]
</version>

What does everyone else think of this solution? Is it the right way to fix this?

lilbud

@fieldofcows I'm thinking this would be the right way. Having to add video support to 80+ systems is not the way I'd imagne spending an afternoon.

herb_fargus

@fieldofcows looks like the best option to me. I suppose if grid view is ever incorporated this will be a solution for that too.

Nismo

@fieldofcows I'm not totally sure but version 4 is not for kids support?

mattrixk

@fieldofcows Any theme that supports @Zigurana's child-friendly icons also needs to be version 4. Does that mean those themes also need to support video previews?

Edit: Hehe, @Nismo beat me to it by 30 seconds.

Nismo

@mattrixk lol, yes @fieldofcows commit must be changed to version 5...

And for me, yes it's the right way...

fieldofcows

@Nismo said in Video View For All Themes:

@fieldofcows I'm not totally sure but version 4 is not for kids support?

Well, this is the problem with multiple ES forks. The RetroPie fork is still on version 3:

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/blob/master/es-core/src/ThemeData.cpp#L98

This would naturally go up to 4 to support this change. However, if there are themes out there for a different fork then it is going to cause problems...

Nismo

@fieldofcows Yes, it's a mess... but I'm still thinking it's the best way to solve the issue...

fieldofcows

Another thought. Instead of checking version numbers we could use something like this:

<feature supported="video">
  [configuration if ES supports video]
</feature>

<feature supported="grid">
  [configuration if ES supports grid]
</feature>

Nismo

@fieldofcows Omg you are a genius, that's totally amazing...

Will that thing cause troubles with older versions of ES?

herb_fargus

@Nismo I agree, I think it makes more sense with all the forks...

fieldofcows

@Nismo said in Video View For All Themes:

@fieldofcows Omg you are a genius, that's totally amazing...

Will that thing cause troubles with older versions of ES?

No, it won't cause trouble with older versions. Ok, I'll make it so.

herb_fargus

As an aside at some point it might be good to add the theming docs for video view to the GitHub themes.md

Nismo

@fieldofcows Yes, I think that's better than the version thing because can be compatible between different forks and doesn't interfere with child icons.

Nismo

@fieldofcows I forgot to ask to you, will be that tag mandatory or optional if you make the commit?

I think it will be mandatory for backwards compatibility... but optional for non backwards compatibility.

hansolo77

I've been experiencing difficulties with various themes and the version of ES as well. For instance, I like the Kid-Friendly version of ES where I can set up favorites and also have a random game picked for me. The problem with that is there is no video support because it uses the older version of ES/xml. So to get video, I update to the latest source of ES. I lose the Kid-Friendly modifications, and gain the video capabilities. Personally, I'd rather get video, as the Kid-Friendly version isn't really all that beneficial since I don't have kids lol.

I would like to point out, in my experimenting I tried the latest carbon_with_video theme, and it didn't work right for me. When I went into a system that had videos (and a properly tagged gamelist.xml) the screen was all white except for the text, and a black box where the video/art should be. I'm hoping it was just a fluke, because I've been messing around with the ES versions. I'm in the process now (almost completed) of scraping all the videos for my games, then I can experiment more.

I mentioned this earlier in the other video preview thread. I think having multiple versions of the themes is really the only way to solve a lot of the headaches, until you roll out a new version of RetroPie completely, which comes with whatever latest version of ES you guys decide on using. That way somebody can go through the process in the ES-Themes scripts and see the breakdown: Carbon, Carbon_v4 (Kid-Friendly), Carbon (Video). When a theme is selected, have the script check the versions and then pop-up an alert saying a newer version of ES is required, and offer the option to automatically install it.

But I also agree with the first post... there should be versions of each theme that natively supports video, as that is the direction of the project and currently available in the latest version of ES.

Nismo

@hansolo77 I'm sure you doesn't have the correct version of ES for video.

can you hear video sound even if you can't see the video?

@hansolo77 said in Video View For All Themes:

When a theme is selected, have the script check the versions and then pop-up an alert saying a newer version of ES is required, and offer the option to automatically install it.

For this I think that every developer must include this option in their fork and I don't know if everybody will commit this. That's the problem with multiple forks.

P.D: I miss a private message option in this forum, @herb_fargus can't be possible to implement it in the forum?

Rookervik

@mattrixk I'm with you on updating things. Once I get something working, I hate to update and take the chance of screwing things up. I've had it happen far too many times. So I, also, have no intention of force-updating ES just to get a theme to work... that used to work fine on older versions.

@lilbud If you've done some theming tricks, a single update to the main.xml will apply to all systems. You shouldn't have to update every single system. But for anyone that has written all of the main theming aspects into the theme.xmls, then yeah, updating a theme can be very, very time-consuming.

I can get video previews ready, and even release it as a separate theme. But until RetroPie has a couple of releases under it's belt containing 'video preview-modded ES' as the main image download from the web page, I don't want to make video previews the main download for my themes. I'd hate to break peoples' systems that just wanted the new graphics on their old and trusty RetroPie setups.