Announcing Pegasus Frontend

PlayingKarrde

I'm getting a lot of performance issues on my theme when trying to implement video also. I've updated my codecs etc and not getting any playback errors in the log so I'm not sure what the issue is other than it just hitching due to trying to load the video into memory each time. Have you had any luck? Do you get hitching on your machine?

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde yes, I've done some measurements on Windows, and with the default theme, the hitching seems to actually happen on the video unloading, ie. when clearing the Video's playlist. I'll need to do some more testing, but so far that's what I see on this PC. However, increasing the delay before starting the video on game select seems to have fixed the issue (I've increased it to 1.5 seconds for testing but I think a few hundred ms should be more than enough).

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow I'm using 300ms for mine but even 1500 doesn't really change anything. I have a video on each delegate tho and I wonder if this has anything to do with it. When loading collections it is very unresponsive until everything has loaded and also there's a lot more hitching when navigating to new rows. Also, I'm not using playlists so I'm not sure that's what it is (at least in my case).

If you want to see what I mean here's my current WIP theme: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3frz1b7ievfqut6/gameOS.zip?dl=0

Also, unrelated but I'm getting tons of this log spam:

libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile

Can't seem to get rid of it. Doesn't affect anything, I just hate log spam haha

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde yes, the delay is caused by the creation of new Video objects for each delegate; creating one takes about 50-85ms, so ~15 of them appearing at once will end up with a visible impact (even without a set source). However, since only one of them will be actually playing content, it's not necessary to create all of them up front, or even create more than one. So as a workaround, you could add a Loader that would load a video player item when the delegate gets selected, and unload its content when deselected, for example.

Also, unrelated but I'm getting tons of this log spam:

Yeah that seem to be frequent among Steam images, but it shouldn't cause actual problems. Blame Valve :)

sunwind

I'd like to get into modding retropie and frontends etc myself, there's just so much to choose from, and I can't figure out how to get that frontend manager working on my existing installation, I went to install experimental packages and it's not there, tried yesterday anyway. am I gonna have to wipe my install and start over with pegasus frontend first, then install things on top of it? what's the 'best' install order etc?

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@PlayingKarrde yes, the delay is caused by the creation of new Video objects for each delegate; creating one takes about 50-85ms, so ~15 of them appearing at once will end up with a visible impact (even without a set source). However, since only one of them will be actually playing content, it's not necessary to create all of them up front, or even create more than one. So as a workaround, you could add a Loader that would load a video player item when the delegate gets selected, and unload its content when deselected, for example.

Yeah I was thinking of something along those lines (and for sure I knew having one mediaplayer per video was a terrible idea haha). I'll look into using a loader as that definitely sounds right. Thanks.

fluffypillow

@sunwind you can just unzip the release for your system somewhere to the SD card then launch it from the terminal. The frontend chooser is not in the RetroPie menu, only the individual frontends, you can get it here instead. The frontend chooser is simply a graphical tool for installing frontends and setting them to run on boot. They are just like any other program, you can install or remove any of them whenever you want.

Purg.Derren

nvm...

fluffypillow

No particularly interesting changes this week, due to local holidays. I do have a long list of pending tasks for the next weeks though, don't worry.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow What do you have on the cards?

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde there are a bunch of short term things like fixing the Steam slowness with the default theme, updating the Flixnet one or supporting Ctrl and co. for key bindings. After that, I'm planning to make some important changes in both the theme Api and the metadata text file format.

For themes, I'd like to change the way sorting and filtering works, and allow the data to appear multiple times with possibly different sorting/filters. In pactice, this means the ability to make a "recently played" list.

For the metadata files, I'd like to unify the format of the collections.txt and metadata.txt, so you wouldn't need to have 2 separate files. There are still some open questions like how to deal with multifile games and game launching in that case. Since it's a visible file format update, I'm trying to be careful about the changes, so there'll certainly be a discussion before it goes live.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow sounds awesome! Keep up the great work!

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

So as a workaround, you could add a Loader that would load a video player item when the delegate gets selected, and unload its content when deselected, for example.

I'm still trying to figure this out. Are you suggesting that I create a Component with a video player at the GridView level then have the loader within the delegate that loads that component? I guess I'm still struggling with where to put the video player so it only gets loaded once.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde something like that, yes. This code for example works for me in your grid item code: https://pastebin.com/fQadMCku (not sure how fast it is on Windows though).

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@PlayingKarrde something like that, yes. This code for example works for me in your grid item code: https://pastebin.com/fQadMCku (not sure how fast it is on Windows though).

Awesome thanks a ton for that. I'd gotten close to this but this is definitely better performance wise. I'm still getting some hitches here and there at times but it's a lot better than before and I think I can live with it for now. I'm getting the occasional

DirectShowPlayerService::doSetUrlSource: Unresolved error code 0x80004005 ()

but that's probably easily solvable. Might be the reason for the hitches too (or it might be due to the unloading to the video similar to what you experienced with playlists).

I've also noticed that playing a sound decreases performance (for navigation sounds). I'm not sure why though. All I'm doing is:

SoundEffect {
        id: navSound
        source: "../assets/audio/nav2.wav"
        volume: 0.5
    }

...

navSound.play()

It's pretty frustrating since audio adds so much but I can't accept that performance hit so will have to do without for now.

Thanks again for the help.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde well according to Microsoft 0x80004005 means "error"... um, yeah. I suppose it failed to load the video on the first try.

I've also noticed that playing a sound decreases performance

Hm does this happen if you use Audio instead? According to the docs "SoundEffect uses slightly more resources to archive lower latencies", though I'd be surprised to see such a small difference causing performance hit like this on a modern desktop PC.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow Audio doesn't really help and actually won't play if it's currently playing meaning you'll often won't get the audio if you are cycling quickly.

It's very strange that I'm having these performance issues because I'm running a pretty powerful PC (i7 5870k, 32gb DDR4 ram, 980 ti).

-edit- OK maybe it was nothing. I restarted my pc and SoundEffect doesn't cause a problem anymore. The only hitch I see now is when a video unloads.

PlayingKarrde

Here's my latest update, slowly but surely:

Still a lot to do but I'm happy with the progress.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde nice, can't wait to see it finished :)

Meanwhile I've just finished building an experimental Windows version that uses a different multimedia "engine", but in turn runs on Win10 only. Could you test how this affects the performance issues (or whether it even works correctly)? It's here, if you get DLL errors, you might need to install this too.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@PlayingKarrde nice, can't wait to see it finished :)

Meanwhile I've just finished building an experimental Windows version that uses a different multimedia "engine", but in turn runs on Win10 only. Could you test how this affects the performance issues (or whether it even works correctly)? It's here, if you get DLL errors, you might need to install this too.

Exciting! However I tried it out and performance actually seems a bit worse? I wasn't able to test with my theme as it throws up an error

TypeError: Cannot call method 'isDetails' of undefined