What's the best way to scrape videos in accordance with my rom list?

Pupsenlalala

Hi.

Now that RetroPie 4.2 is out (wohooo!), I am a bit lost with Videos.
I've managed to scrape my Rom Collection with the UXS scraper. Which gives me screenshots of most of my roms. I also have a emumovies ftp access, so I could download all game video snaps. But how can I (automatically) create the gamelists for my roms including the videos?

I am a bit lost here, what to do next.

Thanks for your help!

TMNTturtlguy

@Pupsenlalala UXS scraper should have auto populated a gamelist for you. It places it in a folder based on what you selected in the USX setup. I would check either your roms folder for a gameslist.xml file or go to /opt/retropie/configs/all/eumlationstiontation/gamelists and they should be saved there. You may need to get to the emulationstation folder by going to /home/pi/.emulationstation (this is a hidden folder). You can manually edit the xml files to add any of your own videos or images. You can also write your own gamelist. Here is a basic format for the gamelist i have used. I scraped my art first, got about 65% of the information and then wrote the rest of the list myself. This took time, but it worked great.

Pupsenlalala

Re: What's the best way to scrape videos in accordance with my rom list?

This is what it looks like:
alt text

So somehow the video tag is empty, I don't know why.
Also the first video scraped with USX is a jpg. It works in retropie but still, it's a jpg. I have no clue why it hasn't scraped the rest and created the XML accordingly... !?

TMNTturtlguy

In my experience, the scrapers all work pretty well, but they do not work perfectly. You will find several errors, missing information, and it will skip scraping several of your games even if you have them named exactly the same way they have them saved on their sites.

First off, to fix the video/add the video, revise the <video/> to <video> and then add the path to your video as in my example. You can manually enter or delete information, just make sure that the path you write is the exact path and name you have on your pi.

For the .jpeg saved in your video line. Do you have a video for that game? is it an .mp4? simply delete the .jpg extension and correct it to .mp4 if your .mp4 is named correctly and in the /fds folder, it should work.

Pupsenlalala

What you're implying is editing my gamelist.xml manually for videos. with someone who has his complete no-intro collection in there, this is going to be a huge amount of work.

Any automated or semi-automated way?

Pupsenlalala

@TMNTturtlguy
So how can I scrape Video Files with let's say UXS or sscraper?
Could you point me to the best way?

Thanks

TMNTturtlguy

@Pupsenlalala To scrape videos is UXS:
-Select Configurations from the top menu bar
-Options configurations - Under "Item Choice" select "Video" and under Parameters to change select "Yes". Click save.
This will allow you to scrape for videos as well as images. Take a look at the options and turn any of them on or off that you want to try to scrape.

Unfortunately I am not sure there is a way to just scrape videos for an existing gamelist without deleting it and starting over. (I would copying your gamelist as a backup) In the General Configurations menu you can select "Scrape Mode" but you can only choose to scrape a new list, update an existing list with new roms or to update the images within a list. It would be nice to be able to just update for video, but that is not an option.

I know you said you have a lot of games. I have a huge amount as well. I found it took more time trying to mess with different scrapers than just finding the videos and adding them manually. It took a while, but probably less time than the headache of trying to get the scraper to see my rom names and getting videos added. If you go to screenscraper.fr you can search the site for roms, and download images and videos. Again, i know that is not what you want to hear, but it works.

Hopefully someone else on the forum has a better solution? Good luck

mattrixk

@Pupsenlalala Another thing to keep in mind is that videos from UXS are between 3 - 15MB on average, so if all of your many games each have a video, it's going to take up a lot of space. I also don't know how well the Pi would handle that many videos. You may be able to get smaller videos from elsewhere, or compress your videos with a program like Handbrake.

Something to think about anyway.

TMNTturtlguy

you can batch reformat the video files down to small sizes like 480x360 an 30 frames per second. This works well. They play fairly well in the standard ES with video support, but if you don't have cooling you may have some temp issues. I would also recommend looking into the OMX work that @fieldofcows and @pjft have been working on. I am going to test @pjft work tonight on the new retropie 4.2, but the omx player and random screensaver features with launghing ability are pretty cool, worked well with 4.19 and play higher resolution videos at lower temperatures. I have also not run into any issues with the number of video files.

Pupsenlalala

Thanks for the info @mattrixk @TMNTturtlguy
At the moment, it looks like I will have to update my gamelist.xml manually for the complete No-Intro Romset.

screech

@Pupsenlalala I see UXS populated your <Video> tag... but with a wrong extension. (jpg)

Try to put "Default" in Configuration/Advanced/Image configuration Menu.
It will solve your problem.

(Need to put that on default config :S )