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LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+


Jason Carr

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Let me chime in on VLC since it seems to be coming up a lot here. The issues we've had with it have literally nothing to do with VLC itself; they have to do specifically with the difficulty of integrating *any* video player into the app with support for animations, transitions, etc. To be frank, integrating MPC or any other video player at this point would be a horrible idea, simply because we'd be back at square one, and it would do nothing to fix any bugs; we would instead end up with more bugs to fix. Integrating any particular video player requires immense amounts of code; there's no such thing as a way to easily swap them out, because there's no standard way that video players are implemented.

The only reason why we've had less issues with the Windows Media Player implementation is because Microsoft already went through all the work for us. That said, even they've had problems getting everything working across all systems, and WMP refuses to work correctly on some systems as a result (not to mention WMP is likely to get dropped in upcoming versions of Windows). It's not easy to integrate a video player into WPF with support for transitions, animating the videos, playing several videos at once, etc. Switching to a new video player would only cause us more work and we'd have to start over from scratch, so it's just not at all a good idea.

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1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

Let me chime in on VLC since it seems to be coming up a lot here. The issues we've had with it have literally nothing to do with VLC itself; they have to do specifically with the difficulty of integrating *any* video player into the app with support for animations, transitions, etc. To be frank, integrating MPC or any other video player at this point would be a horrible idea, simply because we'd be back at square one, and it would do nothing to fix any bugs; we would instead end up with more bugs to fix. Integrating any particular video player requires immense amounts of code; there's no such thing as a way to easily swap them out, because there's no standard way that video players are implemented.

The only reason why we've had less issues with the Windows Media Player implementation is because Microsoft already went through all the work for us. That said, even they've had problems getting everything working across all systems, and WMP refuses to work correctly on some systems as a result (not to mention WMP is likely to get dropped in upcoming versions of Windows). It's not easy to integrate a video player into WPF with support for transitions, animating the videos, playing several videos at once, etc. Switching to a new video player would only cause us more work and we'd have to start over from scratch, so it's just not at all a good idea.

Fair enough, good point well made. That's all it takes or needs sometimes, a simple explanation for everyone to read and take in.

 

 

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Personally, I feel the biggest concern is the fact that most of the video players out there do not rely on internal decoding, VLC does. This means if you wanted to play a certain kind of file not included with Windows, you can't without manually installing splitter, filter, codecs... It's a real mess. This would also mean that each person would have a completely different setup so the amount of bugs and work needed to make them all function will be multiplied many times over. VLC is also a great little player and even supports many non-standard formats like VGM and they play just fine as audio clips or soundtracks too and OFC this is not specifically intended to be a thing in LB but is a happy side effect. Now that we have found out why VLC had been performing so badly recently, we can focus on sussing out the last few issues and should be fine.

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yeah, hasn't vlc been the way to go as far as players since the late early 2000s?  I don't see any reason not to focus on that one, and leave the others to secondary status.  I don't have any problems with my LB/BB and the vlc setting.  I am just using the metallic theme and a standard view.

Edited by damageinc86
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I'm not sure if there's a bug with VLC causing crashes, to be honest. I've been testing my setup with some consistency, and from the crashes I've been having I'd actually say my problems have been caused by automatic soundtrack playback.

What happens is if I select a game and then quickly select another one just as the tune starts playing, LaunchBox or Big Box will crash, trying to access something that's not really there. Now, it might have to do with the audio codec or it might have to do with how LB starts audio playback, I'm not sure.

What I'll try is a workaround, to use only the audio provided in the demo videos, or to do that manually, and try to see if my issue persists.

Anyway, I'm not sure if the crashes talked about might be related to this, but in my personal case, it seems to be audio related. Unfortunately, the error doesn't provide me with a proper stack trace. @Jason Carr, do you intend to implement a logging system? I guess it could make troubleshooting easier.

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@creamdonut, that is good to know. I was seeing that at one point as well, so you're probably onto something with the audio. There is actually a logging system implemented already but it does need a bit more fleshing out. If you manually open Settings.xml in a text editor and change DebugLog to "true", that will enable a log file in the LaunchBox folder. It doesn't log everything yet though.

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@Jason Carr i just tried the Audit menu item for the very first time. I ran it for MAME. It's been running for 30 minutes so far, but only a blank screen with bottom window scrolling bar. I have i5 2500k 8GB ram and no other software or AV running. It's been using one full core the whole time. I'm going to give it an hour, but how long are you guys seeing it take for MAME? Of course, it is a very large amount of games.

Edit: I think it might be nice to cache the audit results to disk and the next time you run that audit, it does a diff of sorts so it comes up faster than an hour or however long it's going to take mine.

Edit: it finally came up. i think somewhere around 40 minutes or so.

Edit: i have to do some other stuff on the computer but don't want to close the MAME audit results window, but it has no way to minimize! :( 

Edited by ckp
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35 minutes ago, Rincewind said:

Can you not Alt + Tab to the next window

Sure you can do that, but I didn't want to have the full screen of it distracting me behind my other windows and covering my desktop as well.

Anyway, it really should have a minimize.

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I wish the First column (Title) could be frozen so I could scroll to the right to leave any position on the other columns, while still being able to see the game title.

Edit: Also when I was removing Casino genre from some games that had a Casino checkmark but were not at all casino games, after I edited them to remove the Casino setting, they remain in the audit results window with casino still checked. Looks like none of your changes are reflected in the audit window unfortunately, like even after deleting duplicate games, there are still checkmarks and red highlight even though there aren't any more duplicates.

Edit: Is there no column to show which games are hidden? I really wanted to see that.

Edit: Cool, found some MAME duplicates so I deleted all the ones that I didn't realize I had from my C drive somehow. It said it was going to permanently delete them from my collection so I was hesitant thinking it would delete the actual files too, but I took a chance and it did not delete the actual rom files thankfully (but some people might want the option to do either?).

Edit: this is really great. finding some cleanup to do in my MAME platform

Edited by ckp
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Parsing any list of thousands or tens of thousands of line items possibly from multiple different sources and attempting to compare them to a database trying to match each to a known entry, then return a list to you in a legible output format takes time. No way around that.

Let's not start getting unreasonable with our expectations here.

 

Edited by GreenGriffon
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This is why I would love for Launchbox to be able to import a simple xml game list like those that have already been curated from Hyperspin and/or Don's tools xml generator.  There's gotta be a way to do that.  MAME is a beast, and with the don's tools program you can make a really nice database with so many filters in a very short time.  I could probably add my arcade setup because I also matched my mame games directory to my xml already, so there are no crap mahjong or casino roms in my directory at all.  But a full set seems like it might be quite the task to do in launchbox.  It would be a great step towards ease of integration if there was an import xml option that looked for those other types of xml's that users are able to make already, and fused those into the launchbox style of xml.

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I've been trying out the auditing in the last days.

I'm missing a column for the Launchbox GamesDB ID. I think this would be very helpful when auditing.

I've come up with two options:
1. A checkbox indicating if the game has a Launchbox GamesDB ID (or not).
2. A link to the game on http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/ as in the "Edit Game"-dialog (and no link if the GamesDB ID is missing) 

I think I would prefer option 2, but option 1 should work too.
What do you think?

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4 hours ago, ckp said:

It's been running for 30 minutes so far, but only a blank screen with bottom window scrolling bar.

 

34 minutes ago, GreenGriffon said:

Parsing any list of thousands or tens of thousands of line items possibly from multiple different sources and attempting to compare them to a database trying to match each to a known entry, then return a list to you in a legible output format takes time. No way around that.

I think the image processing is 80+ % of the loading time (I've tried checking/unchecking image types in the image priority options, which has a huge impact). I think there should be an option to exclude all image columns (when you want to audit other things than images).

Edited by Norfair
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