CriticalCid

Here's a video which shows the EmuMovies platform video for the SNES in comparison (ignore the HyperSpin theme around of it). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HGpFzpwcBg Basically they use 5 seconds long snippets of various games and fade them together. Pretty simple and clean and completely different than the video what @IlhanK did. I personally think it would be better to be a little bit flashier and experimental like IlhanK's video because it's way more exciting to watch. Also there's no need to copy the pretty basic style of EmuMovies.

I agree. These sound effects are really great! It’s also nice to see that we have such talented and professional people in this community :)

Whoah that looks awesome! Good job! Both thumbs up, I really like it! :) @SentaiBrad will probably hate me for saying this but I think that’s definitely the way that his official LaunchBox platform videos should take as well :) It’s something completely different than the standard EmuMovies platform videos and much more exciting.

I agree with that. A nested filter option would be the ideal way to realize this. I also just posted a video on this ticket which shows how the RomCollectionBrowser for Kodi handles that. Here’s the link for the ticket: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/311/nested-filters But voting for my submenu ticket is still also a good idea ;)

I have to say that it was REALLY hard to pick my winner over the Final Fantasy and Pokémon series. I've never stopped loving Pokémon since I was a little kid and put thousands of hours in the whole series and even tried to play the last games competitive. On the other hand is Final Fantasy 9 my favorite game of all-time and many other entries of the series are as well one of the best games I’ve ever played. But in the end I decided to choose Mass Effect. I just love the trilogy with all of my heart and have completed every game multiple times to 100%. The whole universe and especially the characters are just so well and fondly designed. Tali and Garrus are one of the best written video game characters I’ve ever saw and overall it’s the best sci-fi universe I know. Yes, each part has it's own flaws and at first it was kinda frustrating to see that part 3 didn't use all the potential it had but overall it’s my favorite video game series of all time.

I know that feeling. I have 1200+ games in my library and still 500+ on my wishlist… Fortunately I’ve completed my Final Fantasy collection on Steam now. I only miss 5, 6, 11 and 14 but I don’t care about the MMORPG’s and don’t want the ugly iOS ports of 5 and 6 either. Unless they offer the original 16 bit version of those games I don’t bother to buy them and play those two through SNES emulation.

What I’ve picked up so far: A Game of Thrones - Genesis: 2,49€ Crimzon Clover: World Ignition: 1,99€ Final Fantasy III: 6,49€ Final Fantasy IV Bundle: 11,49€ Grandia II Anniversary Edition: 9,99€ Halo: Spartan Bundle: 2,49€ Pinball FX2 - Deadpool Table: 0,79€ Tales of Symphonia: 7,99€ Total: 43,72€ ~ 48,70$ The maximum I want to spend on each sale are 50€, so I’m doing pretty well so far :)

Unfortunately I’m currently not in the mood to deal with that topic any further right now… Maybe some day in the future, we will see.

I thought a lot about it and it was a really hard decision but I’m sorry to tell you all that I won't upload any of my themes. You heard Jason. I can’t share my videos in the way I would have wanted it without pissing some people off and that’s why I’ve decided to not share it at all. I don’t like it either but I’m not willing to unintentionally advertise a paid premium service of a competing FrontEnd from which I won't see any penny of it myself and something that should be free anyway. So please just accept my decision and don't argue with me about it.

SentaiBrad said Well if we can push the frames per second (during encoding not playback) to make it viable, that's once thing. If you can nail a sweet spot with bitrate too the time to completion will be faster. I mean Cid, you have an octa-core CPU. Your encoder should be utilizing the multi-threading very well. Not everyone will have this to encode with. Assuming 30fps for playback, at 15 to encode that's 1 second of playback for 2 seconds of encoding time. What is the average length? Multiply the average across the total amount of video's left. You have a rough estimate, give or take, the length in which you can encode. It's also worth noting that I generally attempt to encode at higher bitrates. What was the bitrate you chose Cid? I encode in 60fps with CRF 18. The average length is 35 seconds. And my CPU is a really cheap and old hexa-core. Every i5 CPU, no matter what generation, should be way better.

For the performance I can say that my work PC I use to record and render the videos can play all the x256 videos completely fine through BigBox. It’s an AMD Phenom II Hexa-core with 3.0 Ghz and a AMD HD 6870. Both of them are 6 years old. I also encode circa 15 frames per second with this machine on the “medium” preset. So I don’t see any reason to not use it.

But all my recorded themes are in 4:3 as well? I record them in the original 4:3 resolution of HyperSpin (1024x768). That’s the reason why I can use the original 4:3 aspect ratio of the themes + wheels beside of it on a 16:9 resolution. Like I said, if you want to use recorded 4:3 themes in full screen on your 4:3 monitor you have to wait until Jason adds video backgrounds or remove the wheels or you have to stretch them on the height until they fit.

Yeah I heard you that you want to know my settings but there are quite a lot of steps and it would take me a lot of time to write that all down with explanations because everything is command line based now. I’ll do it if I find the time and mood to do it, so please just be patient. And are you really sure that you want to change the aspect ratio of the videos? That will look kinda ugly if everything is stretched on the height.

I would guess so but I don’t know how to do it. Like I said was this just a test I did and I don’t know XAML at all. Basically I just deleted every element one by one until I had only the wheels and videos left and then I just resized them until I had the video in full screen. That’s how far my XAML skills go If someone want to google and fix that, you're more than welcome

I have the same issue on my 16:10 monitor as well because the theme is only optimized for 16:9 desktop resolutions and I don’t know how to make it flexible for different aspect ratios. Like I said was this theme just a quick test I did in 10 minutes and isn’t flexible at all. So unfortunately you have to manually adjust it. To change it you have to open the WheelGamesView.xaml in the theme folder and change to values of ColumnDefinition Width="25*" /> ColumnDefinition Width="75*" /> The values say how much space of the screen the wheels and the video are using in percent. The upper value is for the wheels and the lower value for the video. Just change it until it fits for your aspect ratio. The * has to be at the end of the numbers and the sum of both numbers have to result 100. Unfortunately if you are using a 4:3 aspect ratio you have to completely remove the wheels by setting them to 0 and set the video to 100 percent to get the videos work in full screen. Until Jason hasn't added support for video backgrounds there’s currently nothing you can do to change that.

Great news guys. I’ve got permission from all the people in charge to continue and share my little project :) As soon as I know all the details I’ll share them with you. To the video discussion: I would prefer if we wouldn’t discuss this here. Yeah it’s a very legal limbo on all the artwork and video stuff and there are a lot of people with a lot of different opinions about this. But to be fair: all the media creators put a lot of work in it and it is only fair and respectful to ask and get permission for it. Because like Derek said, we don’t want to piss people off and it’s better for everyone if we respect the work of others even if they can't claim full copyright to it. So far was everyone I've asked for permission really friendly and understanding with moderate and comprehensible terms. I don’t see any reason why we should give a damn about their opinion and provoke an unnecessary hassle in the emulation/FrontEnd community with LB in the middle. In the end we all share the same hobby so just be nice to each other :)

Wow that really looks like that it could be a skin for a HTPC media center, I like it!

No problem at all. But thanks for reminding me that the old themes were still online. I’ve uploaded them before I've asked for any permission because I was still testing around and wanted to share my tests, my bad. And yeah, of course I could have taken some free videos like the progetto video snaps but to be honest are the EmuMovies ones way better (60fps, more or less the same length, better resolution) and I can record every system, not only the MAME ones. And I also plan to record 16:9 main menu themes after my arcade project so I would’ve needed EmuMovies videos for it anyway. But if @Jason wants to distribute the themes for free from his own server I could record progetto versions as well.

Calm down guys. Yes, the videos are indeed from EmuMovies and yes I have talked with Circo about this. He and his team are completely cool with this as long as I host the videos on their server. I know that it’s not an ideal solution because that means you‘ll need a premium membership over their but I truely can’t blame them for this. But on the other side he said that it would be no problem at all to get them downloadable directly through LaunchBox. But we could have a bigger problem now. Circo made me aware that the HS engine could be protected and not allowed to be recorded and that my permission from one of their media section admins over there won't be enough. He will speak with the HS creators tomorrow and then we will see. But he also thinks that it would be fine, so I'm hoping he's right. I've taken down the themes I’ve already recorded for now. Sorry for the confusion.

Short update, I have recorded over 800 themes with my new method so far and they look just great! If everything works as expected I will release a complete set of almost EVERY available arcade theme from all arcade systems (MAME, Sega Model 2, Sega Naomi, Daphne, Taito Type X, etc. Over 2000 themes in total!) on this weekend! I won’t upload any of these before I’ve finished everything because all themes are in only one folder right now and I want to sort them by arcade system first before I release it.

Yeah, H265 is a huge improvement over H264. I’ve tested a few themes and in the most cases the file size was a third smaller with it.

Yes, you can turn off your PC with a gamepad in the BigBox main menu.

Like I said it’s just a MS Paint mockup on how I wanted to create this theme. But now that Jason plans to add this as a standard view there’s no need for me to learn XAML and to do it myself. Now I can use the time which I would’ve needed for learning that stuff to record and edit the actual HS themes. So if you have wishes for it you should tell them @Jason like I did in the post you’ve quoted :)

Big news guys! I’ve managed to get a new and even better workflow for recording themes. That means that the bridging errors should be almost completely gone and that I render the videos with the H265 codec as .mp4 files now. Because I won’t have to manually fix a lot of bridging errors anymore I will be able to record and finish new themes a lot faster! Additional to all the new themes which are coming I will also re-record and replace the themes that are currently online so that every theme will be created with my new processing settings. So stay tuned, huge updates are coming! @Supreme: It’s not an official feature yet but according to Jason it will be soon. For now it’s more testing and not intended to be used with your normal LaunchBox setup. But if you still want to use the theme videos right now you can grab my theme for it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_6XLOBnGwlUT2F3MXVhaDFoQ00/view The theme videos go into “\LaunchBox\Video\Arcade\” And here’s a video from Jason on how you handle custom BigBox themes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkNHRvdl2jU

Oh my, that looks absolutely gorgeous. Awesome idea! :)