retropie 4.2 videopreview slowdowns/crashes

ezra84

Hi, for me the videopreview work great with the original Carbon theme in RetroPie 4.2 on a Pi3.

Most of the previews work fine, but some videos show a lot of artefacts or blurring/smudging whilst playing. After a while I also get the overheating icon in the top right of the screen.

All the previews were automatically scraped with SSelph Scraper. I see the resolution is 640x480. Taking the comment from @matchaman I will try to convert them to 320x240 and hope that it helps. Will let you know..

Any other suggestions how I can improve the performance of this feature in RetroPie and also taking care of the overheating?

Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!

TMNTturtlguy

@ezra84 in the start menu change the video player to OMX. That should solve all of your video and over heating issues.

pjft

@ezra84 What @TMNTturtlguy is correct.

As for the resolution, if you're going to downscale them, 480x360@30fps should work well.

Best.

ezra84

@tmntturtlguy hey thanks for your response.
I saw a youtube video showing exactly what you're saying, but I can't find that option (use omx player) in the start menu->other settings. Could you please tell how to add it?

I tried to install OMX player via commandline but it says it's already installed.

Regarding my previous comment, it actually works converting the videos to 240p. No more artefacts or overheating but it's a hassle of work. Obviously your solution is much much better :)

pjft

@ezra84 You might need to update ES, if that's the case, via RetroPie-Setup.

ezra84

@pjft @TMNTturtlguy Indeed it was an ES update. Enabled OMX player and works like a charm!

Thanks guys!

ezra84

Hi guys,
I noticed that (when using OMX player) the sound level of the video previews is much louder than the sound level in-game.
Is there a way to normalize this?

Thanks in advance.

pjft

@ezra84 there have been reports of that, and it's something I'll look into.

In this thread, someone has managed to get a set up that normalizes the volumes to a certain extent:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12460/can-i-adjust-volume-when-using-omxplayer-in-emulationstation

Thanks.

ezra84

@pjft Alright thanks for the info!

pjft

@ezra84 Hi.

I apologize for bothering. Could you test with VLC and confirm whether the volume is different or the same as OMX Player? What volume do you have set in EmulationStation?

Thanks.

ezra84

@pjft no need for apologizing, it's only fair to return the favor.

I recall that VLC was similar to the emulator sound and since I've changed it to OMX it was much louder. I believe the sound slider was set on 77%, which is the standard setting in ES.

One more note, yesterday I pumped up the sound slider to 100% and it seemed the OMX video preview was the same as the emulator sound. So from that alone I can conclude that the slider affecting the emulators, but not OMX. And that 100% slider matches OMX sound level.

Anyway, I will test it properly tonight, will keep you posted

pjft

@ezra84 Thank you - that would be very much appreciated. If you can also test with VLC, that would be helpful, as I'm trying to understand what or how to address this.

By the way, what ES version are you in, though? I have recently-ish submitted a change to allow the ES sound slider to also affect the OMX Player volume - could you check that you're on 2.6.1 or above, and if not, update ES from the latest Binary and check again. If you reduce the ES volume it should reduce the video audio as well - on both VLC and OMX Player.

I just want to understand what exactly is the issue.

The reports in the other thread seemed to suggest that OMX was louder than VLC, so I was thinking that it would be an issue with how I implemented the audio volume on the OMX end.

However, yesterday I tested both VLC and OMX Player on 95% and they seemed to be pretty much the same volume between the two. It might be a volume scaling thing when I convert the % volume to the OMX Volume, or it might be that the video volume will always be louder than the emulator's one because different systems will have different default volumes in the original hardware - which would then beg the question of whether we want to force video volume as a whole to be quieter, and how.

Thanks for the help and let me know what you find!

jwcbronski

@pjft Here's what I found out: If you set the ES sytem volume to 100% the VLC and OMX sound levels are nearly the same. If you lower the ES volume the volume difference between the two players get's bigger. At 80% ES volume OMX is much louder that VLC and the emulators.

pjft

@jwcbronski Thanks. That's quite helpful. I'll try to look into that then and get a better approximation of the sound volumes as it gets lower.

ezra84

@pjft I don't even know how to check the version :) but I just updated everything (OS/Kernel etc.). I can only see I'm on RetroPie 4.3.1 right now.

You're right, the slider affects both VLC and OMX. on 100% it's pretty much the same (good enough) but I think VLC is a little bit louder. If I slide back to 77% or even 50% the difference gets bigger, OMX is much louder than VLC.

Hope this helps.

ezra84

@jwcbronski This is exactly what i found too.

pjft

Thanks all.

I spent some time this morning coming up with a better approximation based on plain observation as there's little documentation here.

I submitted a PR for it, so hopefully this should be improved shortly.

If anyone wants to take a stab at testing it, and is comfortable with compiling code (or using @meleu's script to install test branches) this is my dev branch, based on 2.6.3.

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/tree/OMX-Volume

You may also download a binary for the Pi 3 here:

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/0.1-OMX/emulationstation

Place it somewhere on your pi, exit the main ES, run chmod +x emulationstation and then ./emulationstation and see how it performs at the different volume levels, especially compared to VLC.

Would love to hear your impressions. Be mindful that different videos have different volumes, as well as different hardware systems (i.e. emulators), but hopefully this performs better.

Thanks.

jwcbronski

I just tested it and it works great. With ES volume at 100% and 85% the volume of VLC and OMX is nearly identical. VLC seems to be a littler louder but that doesn't really matter.

Thanks for the improvement. Now I can start using higher quality video previews.

pjft

@jwcbronski Thanks.

It was effectively a very ad hoc trial and error approach to coming up with something that would be similar, as they use drastically different volume ranges and settings.

I hope this one works best. Feel free to keep using this version of ES for the time being, and whenever this gets merged to the stable branch you can use it.

Thanks!