AstroBob

Hey there! 👋 Welcome to the LB family! So when you close Big Box, the default behaviour will not automatically open LaunchBox. If you want to do that, from Big Box's system menu, there's an item called Switch To Desktop Mode which will close Big Box gracefully and take you into LaunchBox. Likewise, in LaunchBox, if you click the LaunchBox logo in the top left, there's an option to go straight to Big Box, without needing to close LaunchBox down first. If you’re seeing the “Another instance of LaunchBox or Big Box is already running” message, it’s likely that the app didn’t fully close due to a background process hanging. We’ve put together a guide that walks through common causes and steps you can take to resolve it: 👉 https://feedback.launchbox.gg/help/articles/0507346-troubleshooting-another-instance-is-already-running-error If you continue to see that error after following the steps in that guide, feel free to reach out—we’ll be happy to help investigate further!

Black Friday is here, and we’ve dialed our prices back like it’s 1999 😎 Everything on our site is discounted with savings up to 50% off. From Windows to Android, upgrades, renewals, and bundles – if it’s on our site, it’s on sale. 👾 What’s on Sale: LaunchBox Premium for Windows LaunchBox for Android Renewals and upgrades Bundles -------------------------- 🔗 Purchase link: -------------------------- We’re incredibly grateful that our community looks forward to this time each year, it’s truly become a LaunchBox tradition. For our friends who celebrate Thanksgiving, we hope you enjoy a wonderful long weekend filled with great food, relaxation, and plenty of gaming. And of course, let us know what you’ll be playing! 🎮 Happy Black Friday, and happy gaming! 💙 The LaunchBox team

Hiya, thanks for the update, and apologies that this thread has been a bit quiet recently. We’re currently gearing up for the next round of this beta, which includes a new set of fixes. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to reproduce your specific crash just yet and so can’t guarantee that it will address this issue specifically, but rest assured that we’re reviewing all of the logs and reports shared here to help us pinpoint areas for improvement. We genuinely appreciate you taking the time to send them over. Thanks again for keeping the reports coming, and apologies for the recent lack of acknowledgment. We hope to have a new beta ready soon so we can continue narrowing these issues down.

Hi Folks, Thanks for reporting this and apologies for the issues here. We’ve identified a known issue where LaunchBox can crash when trying to download videos from Steam. We believe this is caused by a change to Steam's backend that we use to pull video media, and manifests in a few different situations (like editing metadata or using the import wizard). We’re actively working on a fix, and we’ll post updates on our known issue report here: 🔗 https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/launchbox-error-when-attempting-to-download-video-media-from-steam In the meantime, you’ll find a list of steps in that post to help you avoid the crash. If you upvote that post, you'll automatically get updates once we have confirmed a fix. Thanks for bearing with us while we get this sorted.

Hiya, thanks for flagging this. We're digging into this with the team to see what's up here. In the meantime, would you mind sharing the specific game page you edited so we can dig into those specific changes on our side? Thanks for bearing with us on this.

We’re currently investigating an issue where LaunchBox crashes when attempting to download trailer videos from Steam — this can happen when editing metadata, using the media import wizard, or running automatic imports on startup. It seems to be caused by a recent change on Steam’s end, and we’re actively investigating a solution. 📌 Follow our known issue post here for updates and to be notified once fixed, and it also outlines steps you can take to mitigate the error temporarily. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted!

Hiya, You’re not alone here. I’d personally love for this to be a thing, and it’s definitely something we’ve considered. We have an ongoing feature request for it, which you can follow and add your support to: https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/identify-games-with-retroachievements-sets-but-invalid-hashes The biggest blocker right now is that we don’t maintain a direct link between a RetroAchievements game page and our LaunchBox Games DB game page. That means any searching we do to look up game info on RA would rely on names, which isn’t foolproof and can easily lead to errors (for example, if the game names in LaunchBox don’t match those on RA). Ideally, our Games Database would include a field containing the RA game page ID (also tracked here): https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/add-retroachievements-game-page-id-to-launchbox-games-database With that in place, we could reliably look up the correct page and flag games that have sets but don’t match your files. We’re not saying this will never happen, but this is where things stand at the moment.

Amazing! Looks great, nice touch on the front panel there 😉

Thanks for pointing this out folks. We've fixed up this link on the forum. Thanks for flagging it!

Request in question incase anyone else is interested: 🔗 https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/shortcut-for-favoritestags-in-screensaver

Hi there, Thanks for the update report there. To close out the screensaver transition bug, this just got released today in 13.25 beta-1. Regarding the new issue you reported, we're already aware of this and actively working on changing how that works. It's not avaliable just yet, but I'l take not of this post to let you know when there's something you can test. Thanks so much for reporting these things though! Definately keep them coming if you notice anything else

Hey folks, really appreciate you both laying all this out in detail. To provide a bit of backstory: VLC has always been a bit of a double-edged sword for us. On one hand, it had some really powerful capabilities that made ambitious themes possible. On the other hand, it has always been heavier than Windows Media Player in terms of resource use, and once we hit versions 13.19 through 13.22, the old VLC wrapper started freezing Big Box randomly for a lot of users. That was the red flag that forced us to take a hard look at things. The real problem is that the .NET wrapper we used to make VLC work inside Big Box has not been updated in over 8 years. Once it started breaking down, we were stuck because we could not patch it ourselves, and the author is long gone. Even if it still worked fine for some users back on 13.18, the truth is it was a ticking time bomb. Every new Windows, .NET, or driver update risked breaking it further, and there was no path forward. That is why we moved to FFmpeg in 13.23. It is not perfect yet, and you are absolutely right to call out the regressions with TransitionPresenter, IsContentVideo, complex grids, and higher bitrate files. VLC could handle those scenarios better, and we know this change hit curated builds and custom themes especially hard. But FFmpeg gives us something we can actually maintain and improve. Unlike VLC, it is not frozen in time and we can keep iterating on it. I also want to set expectations clearly. Rolling back is not really an option. If we reintroduced VLC, we would just be bringing back instability and freezing that we cannot fix. It might look like a step forward for some users, but it would be a step backward for everyone else in the long run. What we can do is keep improving FFmpeg to close the gap. That is where your feedback is huge. @Bussifrog, if you are open to it, we would love to test your theme directly so we can see exactly where the playback is falling short. The more complex examples we can test against, the better job we can do making sure FFmpeg holds up under those loads. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to explore this We hear you. This was not just a cosmetic change, it affected real projects. But our goal is to build a video engine that is stable today and sustainable for tomorrow. VLC had the features but not the stability. FFmpeg has the stability, and now we are focused on bringing the features up to par. Thanks again for the honest feedback. Please keep the specific examples coming, because that is what helps us move this forward.

Hi Folks, Thanks for the report here. I can confirm the same issue you're seeing on my end. I've gone ahead and created a bug report on our end to investigate this. You can follow the post for updates and to know once we've got this fixed up. - https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/microsoft-store-login-does-not-complete-in-manage-storefront Thanks for the report here and apologies for the issues there

Heya, Thanks for the great idea here, personally think this could be a great initiative to lower the barrier to entry for theme creators. Right now it's very much driven by the community sharing their idea and works, but if there's a way we can facilitate lowering that barrier through the app itself, I can see a lot of value there. I hope it's okay, but i've scoped out a request on our feature tracking site, just so others can vote on it and gauge interest in an official solution to this - https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/starter-templates-for-big-box-theme-creation Feel free to upvote and follow along there. That said, there's technically nothing stopping anyone in the community from creating these at the moment, so would love to hear what others think and how they might want to see something like this implemented