AstroBob

Hi Folks, Thanks for the report. We do have an official troubleshooting guide regarding performance, with multiple steps and optimisations that you can take that may help out. I’m attaching it below: - https://feedback.launchbox.gg/help/articles/9454889-troubleshooting-launchbox-and-big-box-performance It would be great if you’re able to run through that guide and make some of the suggested tweaks to see if that helps, and also please make sure you’re on the latest 13 version (currently 13.24), since we are continuously adding optimisations and improvements around performance. Let us know how you get on and if any of those suggestions make a noticable difference for you

Hi there, Sorry for the delayed reply here. May I ask are you able to update to the latest beta 13.25 beta-3, since there have been some fixes to the screensaver mode in this version. If it still happens on this version let us know - How to update to beta versions

Just adding for anyone else stumbling upon this post, we have a troubleshooting guide specifically for instances of LaunchBox / Big Box getting stuck in task manager. - https://feedback.launchbox.gg/help/articles/0507346-troubleshooting-another-instance-is-already-running-error It provides some steps you can take to try and troubleshoot this if it continues to happen

Hi Folks, Just to let everyone here know we have a feature request scoped for this which you can access here: - https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/favorite-tag-game-controller-mapping-and-filter-side-bar-pinning Please don’t hesitate to upvote it to follow along with updates. Cheers,

Hi Folks, I’m not sure if this is 100% related but Epic Games recently updated their terms of service, which needs to be accepted on their website before the imports will work. If you log into the Epic Games store via your browser, if you are prompted to accept the new terms, once you do so imports should work again. If not let us know and we can rule this out and see what next steps would be

Hi everyone, We’ve just released a new beta version of LaunchBox that restores Steam trailer downloads and resolves the related crashes. You can get the fix by updating to the latest beta (currently 13.25 beta-3). To learn how to update to a beat build, check out our guide here: 🔗 https://feedback.launchbox.gg/help/articles/4797671-launchbox-beta-versions If you’d prefer not to update to a beta build, don’t worry — this fix will be included in the upcoming official 13.25 release. Thank you for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue.

Hi folks, apologies for the delayed follow-up on this. Unfortunately, there is no official fix for the Microsoft Storefront integration just yet. We’re still working on it, but whenever these backend changes occur with each storefront provider, it often requires us to rewrite a significant portion of our integration code. We’re facing similar issues at the moment with a backend change to Steam, which we’ve been prioritizing and hope to have resolved very soon. We’re due to push our official Android and Windows updates in the coming weeks, so for full transparency, it’s very likely that we won’t have a fix for the MS Storefront integration ready in time for that release. Rest assured, though, that we are actively working on it. The workaround that @kmeyer1212 suggested is a good one, if you have shortcuts, you can still point your game entries to those. And as of a recent release (I believe 13.24), Windows shortcuts are now handled properly with auto-ROM imports and directory scanning. I know this isn’t ideal, but we’ll be sure to update the official bug report as soon as we have more information. Thanks for bearing with us.

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

No worries at all, thanks for understanding, and we definately appreciate the feedback. It helps keep us grounded and lets us know where we need to focus our attention. Thanks so much for voting up the request and adding additional detail, it already seems to be getting some good traction and we agree that it would be great to have. We'll have a look at what that would take internally and will be sure to post any updates to that post.

Hi there, Thanks for catching this and sharing the video! Looks like this one slipped through with 13.24, but we’ve logged a bug report for the issue and are already working on a fix. You can follow progress and get updates here: 🔗 Screensaver skips a game during transitions. Thanks for the report

Version 13.24 - Released September 28th 2025 Release Summary Full Changelog: https://www.launchbox-app.com/about/changelog Improvements: D-Input controllers such as DualSense, DualShock, and Nintendo Pro controllers should now have right analog stick support You can now launch a game directly from the Game Discovery Center using a keyboard or controller mapping When importing ROMs during the Welcome Wizard, LaunchBox now sets the platform�s Game Folder to the folder you imported from, instead of using the default location The new Auto-Import Media settings are now properly respected during realtime scans Unselecting all image types during the Welcome Wizard is now more accurately respected during first-time imports Startup Videos and Theme Manager previews now properly follow your selected video engine setting The Storefront Manager now opens instantly, with login checks handled in the background instead of delaying the window All HTTP calls have been upgraded to HTTPS for improved security and reliability Fixed: Big Box no longer crashes on launch for systems with unstable hardware video decoding, especially on some RTX 30 series cards and certain integrated GPUs A crash has been resolved when multiple media imports happen at the same time FFMPEG no longer leaves videos running in the background after launching a game When videos were set to start after a short delay, their audio would overlap with the game music instead of replacing it as expected Custom theme video controls now function correctly with the FFMPEG engine, preventing crashes in affected themes The Welcome Wizard�s ROM import process now better mirrors the in-app importer by combining games and filtering out unwanted files Games in the Image Grid now always display their correct and up-to-date artwork, even in rare cases where images previously failed to appear Music playback is now smoother and less prone to stuttering Music compatibility has been improved across more audio file types Custom platform names during import are now more reliably scraped with the correct platform values Transitions will no longer trigger unexpectedly when returning from a game Badge changes from media packs now apply correctly without needing to restart LaunchBox or Big Box Known Issues: While unrelated to the 13.24 specifically, around the same time as the release there were 2 issues over the weekend that users may have experienced: Year, Month, and Day parameters describe an un-representable DateTime Errors An incident on our Games Database led to users experiencing an error that looked like this: Year, Month, and Day parameters describe an un-representable DateTime. Please see our dedicated article below for details on how to resolve this: 🔗 Troubleshooting: "Year, Month, and Day parameters describe an un-representable DateTime" Error MAME 0.281 Metadata Changes With the release of MAME 0.281, the MAME team introduced changes to their file naming standards. These changes caused LaunchBox’s MAME downloader to stop working correctly. ✅ We’ve released an updated MAME Importer plugin that fixes the issue. If you’re using MAME 0.281 (or newer), please make sure you’ve updated to the latest version of the MAME LaunchBox plugin.