Splash screen video intermittently doesn't play

[retrocam]

I’m making my sister a RetroPie for her birthday. It’s coming along really well. I decided to go to the Pi 3 and use a Bluetooth controller. When I made the switch, I noticed that the splash screen video would play maybe 2 or 3 times in a row when rebooting or powering on. Then other times it would pause in terminal for a little bit longer and go straight to the Emulation Station loading screen. It is worth noting, I’m using a good quality 2A power supply, however I have no overclocking and I’m not using many peripherals. I’ve also tried disconnecting the wireless keyboard/mouse dongle and the issue persists. I have a 2.5A power supply coming but time is of the essence and I’m trying to get it as right as possible and I’m not convinced there would be the extra draw at the start causing this issue. Everything else works well, no crashing when playing games etc.

Attached image is where it pauses a bit longer if it’s going to skip the video.

Raspberry Pi 3
RetroPie v3.6
SD Image, then installed from binary in case there were any new updates to fix the issue
USB Devices connected: wireless keyboard/mouse
Controller used: 8BITDO SFC30

[senkun]

Guess I’m not the only one having this issue. Same thing happening with video splashscreens on both my RPi 2 and 3, both running clean installs of latest Retropie 3.6.

The first reboot after selecting a custom video splashscreen, the video shows, and then perhaps it shows on the second/third reboot too (I wiped SD and reinstalled a few times) but without fail on subsequent reboots there will be no video. Yes, I get that same pause too and can tell that the video will fail to play.

If you turn of autostart of emulationstation and turn it back on, sometimes on reboot you get video splashscreen back and then on subsequent reboots no more video. You can also temporarily get video back if you disable fastboot but it doesn’t stick.

I have no idea how to fix this, so gave up and went with a custom static splashscreen instead of video.

I don’t see anyone else posting about this besides 2 other guys in this thread;

Splash video not loading anymore?

So, that makes 4 of us with this issue.

[senkun]

oh and I have both RPis powered from 2.4A usb supply so I doubt it’s a power issue.

[retrocam]

So let’s rule out power, I’ll be double sure when I get my 2.5A power supply.
– I’ve tried a new SD card
– I just replaced my video with the RetroPie_Carbon_SplashVid-02.mp4 in case there was a size or format issue with our custom videos. It lasted 3 reboots and on the 4th didn’t play.

[herbfargus]

Could be related to the boot sequence- possible some things aren’t loading in time for omxplayer to be called so it doesn’t work.

[cfx69]

Having the same issue. My spashscreen video starts then pauses or goes white screen/cuts audio the eventually goes to the emulationstation loading screen.

It’s pretty weird. Works once from a cold start 1 out of 3 times, but restarts always cause the issue.

Not a pressing problem, but just a verification sekun’s not the only one having the issue.

C..

[senkun]

[quote=120502]Could be related to the boot sequence- possible some things aren’t loading in time for omxplayer to be called so it doesn’t work.

[/quote]

On both my Pis (Pi2 and Pi3) they have fresh installs of Retropie 3.6, the Pi2 I wiped the c4 8GB sdcard and reinstalled, the Pi3 is brand new with a brand new c10 16GB sdcard.

First thing I did was choose video splashscreen and reboot. After one or a couple of reboots the video stops showing. It’s just like the attached pic from retrocam, bootup then pauses for a bit and then the white ES loading splashscreen shows up.

On a fresh install, What could be the things which aren’t loading in time for omxplayer to be called? Any tips/ideas for us to troubleshoot this?

It’s not a big deal, but it sure would be nice to have a custom video playing :-)

[herbfargus]

If it is indeed a boot sequence issue a simple workaround would be to add a sleep parametre to the asplashscreen script to delay calling omxplayer.

Without any boot logs though I can’t advise.

[robboman]

There’s another thread about this:

Splash video not loading anymore?

…And to be thorough, here’s a copy of my long post for this thread:

Just chiming in.. I’m having all the same issues on 3.6.

I have an old Pi B+, and a spanky new Pi 3. I tested on both, and it seems the problem is worse on the Pi 3.

On the old Pi, I noticed the video would mostly work, but occasionally fail to play, and sometimes it would play but with no audio. I also noticed that when it failed, it was always on cold powerup. When I’d warm reboot the Pi it would always work.

On the new Pi 3, it worked once I think.. then it failed every time, cold boot or warm reboot.

So my un-technical noob theory is it has something to do with the start sequence and various things not firing up in expected, perfect order. Worse on the 3 because everything loads so much faster.

Hope the devs can fix it, because it’s pretty cool when it all works :)

EDIT: MORE info.. maybe related?

First.. I switched to a static picture splashscreen due to the above issue. Now when I boot the Pi 3, I see the 4 berrys, a few lines, then my splashscreen pic, then the Emulationstation loading screen. It all appears fine, but if I IMMEDIATELY navigate into a system menu and load up a rom, I see my splash pic pop up again before the rom loads. Then the controls freeze up and the screen goes BLACK with only this text in the upper left:

map: vt02 => fb0

If the rom is making sound, I hear it playing in the background, so I know MAME is still running, but I have no keyboard or control input. I was able to SSH in, but sudo reboot now did NOTHING. So I had to yank the plug.

After reboot, if I give it a couple minutes after the menu loads before launching anything, everything seems stable.

[robboman]

[quote=120562]If it is indeed a boot sequence issue a simple workaround would be to add a sleep parametre to the asplashscreen script to delay calling omxplayer.

Without any boot logs though I can’t advise.

[/quote]

My /var/log/syslog is MASSIVE and contains the following line, repeating 4 times a second for hours on end.. this is thousands of log lines

Mar 16 01:25:00 retropie asplashscreen[82]: waiting for dbus address to appear

Are there any other logs I should look at? I don’t know much.. just browsing around

[herbfargus]

Yeah that explains it. Problem is dependencies for omxplayer aren’t being met before its called to run resulting in a dbus error. Putting a sleep parametre on omxplayer is a simple workaround for it at least until logic in the code is improved.

[robboman]

[quote=120616]Yeah that explains it. Problem is dependencies for omxplayer aren’t being met before its called to run resulting in a dbus error. Putting a sleep parametre on omxplayer is a simple workaround for it at least until logic in the code is improved.

[/quote]

Thanks, it worked! I put one new line just before the onxplayer line in etc/init.d/asplashscreen:

sleep 5

Now my splashscreen video plays flawlessly every boot. And just as importantly it is no longer continuously writing 5 lines per second into var/log/syslog indefinitely, while onxplayer is still consuming resources. It opens, plays and closes cleanly as it should, and the last related line in the log file is:

Mar 17 01:09:32 retropie asplashscreen[83]: have a nice day ;)

Nice. I am having a nice day :)

[senkun]

ahaha I just found some time, settled in started digging in the logs, nothing unusual on mine except for waiting on dhcpcd and IPv6 for eth0 which I am not using since on wifi only. I thought I did see a flash of a message on bootscreen about a startjob for dhcpcd so that may be what was preventing the player from running.

Just tried sleep 1 before calling onxplayer in /etc/init.d/asplashscreen and it worked flawlessly as a temp fix, giving it that one second pause gets me video splashscreen every time all the time now. So yea happy days thanks to robboman and herb.

[retrocam]

Fantastic! Thanks so much everyone! :)

This is exactly what fixed it for me:

sudo nano /etc/init.d/asplashscreen

and add sleep 1 in between rm -f /tmp/writable and omxplayer -b --layer 10000 "$line"

10 restarts and still playing :)

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