Views Video Causes System Freeze

amasephy

Hi, I’m brand new to the raspberry pi scene. I finally was able to buy a device and landed with a pi 3a+. Everything I’ve read points to this device being completely sufficient to do old school emulation just fine which has been my experience so far. Batocera was my first choice for a front end and so far I’ve been really impressed.

However, for some reason the “Views Video” feature causes total system lock up. From what I can tell, the video’s themselves are not overwhelming the pi as they are very low resolution and low frame rate. The freeze does not happen right away either, I can scroll through maybe 4 or 5 games before the system starts stuttering and then ultimately freezing. Prior to that the first few games play the video back perfectly.

I’ve been reading old threads where people used this “Views Video” on even older Pi 2’s. Surely the Pi3 is capable of playing these videos back in the skin interface, right? At first I thought the skin I was using “Retrofix” was too heavy. But even switching back to the stock skin “Carbon” results in the same problem.

Is this a known issue? Is the Pi3 supposed to be able to play these videos back without issue? Is there some setting I can change, or produce a log that can isolate the problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. If I can resolve this one issue I will have the perfect setup. Thank you

Atari

It is possible.

I also know that the Pi ¾ were suffering from memory overflow issues. The solution was ultimately found (the Pi was reporting a very, very slightly innaccurate number in regards to how much physical RAM it had), and a workaround to manually place in a known RAM limit fixed it. But maybe there are Pi models still out there with different physical RAM allocations?

Since this is a technical issue, I would suggest creating a new issue report on the Github page so it can be revisited. https://wiki.batocera.org/report_issue

As a workaround, one thing you could try is enabling the “preload” options in the dev settings, though if the loading itself is what is causing the crash then enabling this option might potentially prevent ES from opening (you could perform a factory reset from here to restore the default behaviour without losing all your data).

In general, if you ask me, don’t use Batocera for weaker boards like the Pi 3, use Recalbox or the more dedicated RetroPie. You don’t need bleeding edge software updates.

amasephy

Thanks, I will try the preload option. I’ll write up an issue on Github if that doesn’t work. Doesn’t sound promising though as it seems Batocera is leaving Pi3 behind with the past few releases based on what I’ve read.

I honestly tried both Recalbox and Retropie afterwards to see if they worked better but I had problems with both just getting them setup so I scrapped it. While I’m sure I could tinker with them to get around the issues, I didn’t want to waste the time on it when Batocera worked great except for this one issue.

Atari

Preferably, yes, Batocera would just have all the problems fixed with RPi 3. But seeing that most of the causes of the problems are simply the RPi 3 architecture itself, as opposed to any software malfunctioning, makes me think it will never be truly resolved. This is in part why it’s not so good to rely on hardware which has closed-source binary blobs to run its GPU.

Another thing to try; is to use an older version of Batocera. v30 worked great for me when I was still using the RPi 3.

joinski

I would suggest to use an even older version than v30.
In my eyes v5.27.2 is one of the best versions for RPi2/3
Oh and by the way: you could also test the RPi2 image of v35 (yes it works with RPi3 as well)