MiSTer Super Attract Mode (SAM) is now available - the first game screensaver for your MiSTer!

[muggsy]

Quick question. Only just tried out SAM tonight to try out the commerical video playback. Having a few issues with enabling local playback. Ive download some of the videos from the archive.org repository and when I set the video source samvideo_source="local" and copied the files to /media/fat/video I get nothing. When i run the on script and enable ssh output, i can see an error repeating "error while downloading"

When i dig a bit deeper i found an local video list in /tmp/.SAM_List/ which contains the videos I downloaded.

Setting the location to archive works, but I'd rather not keep downloading the files.

Has anyone successfully gotten local playback to work and can offer some assistance?

Local download is on my to do list. I'll see if I can implement this when I have some time.

Oh wow, I didn't realise it hadn't been implemented fully yet. No hurry at all as I just thought I was doing something wrong
If you need anyone to test I'm more than happy to help

[mrchrister]

Thanks for the offer, pushed some code just now that should make local playback work again. Right now it only plays random videos, next step would be to make it work like the archive downloader function

Update: There is a new option in the ini called keep_local_copy. Set this to yes so that each commercial will only be downloaded once.
SAM will now check if the commercial is available locally before trying to download it from archive.
Please keep samvideo_source="archive".
samvideo_source="local" is meant for random files that are not commercials

[muggsy]

Awesome, I will check it out later tonight when I'm home.
Ultimately (for me at least) is I would like it to play random videos from my NFS share as a screensaver and a way to provide some ambience to my games room. At some point I must have procured a ton of old commercials in varying formats that I would like to use in this setup. Sounds like I'll need to do a mass conversions to XviD though as they are in quicktime, wmv, mp4 etc

[mrchrister]

Oh yeah that should be no problem with local playback working again correctly. It just wouldn't play those games that correspond to the commercials. For that I would need to put these commercials into a XML. Feel free to contribute some commercials missing from the library!

[neogeo81]

i have no playback at all. set the menu to 640x480 and to download from archive. but on the screen nothing happens. i only see the description of the commercial video on the tty2oled but no playback. It just stays on the wallpaper image.

Have you tried changing this value?

I didn't, no. But i gave it up on SAM again because it doesn't work properly unfortunately. When i start it the tty2oled stays black and the game does not start. It even sometimes hangs up the Mister completely and i have to manually restart it or turn it off completely.

[mrchrister]

i have no playback at all. set the menu to 640x480 and to download from archive. but on the screen nothing happens. i only see the description of the commercial video on the tty2oled but no playback. It just stays on the wallpaper image.

Have you tried changing this value?

I didn't, no. But i gave it up on SAM again because it doesn't work properly unfortunately. When i start it the tty2oled stays black and the game does not start. It even sometimes hangs up the Mister completely and i have to manually restart it or turn it off completely.

Every setup is different and with things like video playback unfortunately it's a bit of a hack to get it working, so your mileage may vary. I have two testing setups, one connected to a CRT and the other to a small HDMI screen. It's working well on both setups but that's all the testing I can do before pushing updates.

[neogeo81]

Have you tried changing this value?

I didn't, no. But i gave it up on SAM again because it doesn't work properly unfortunately. When i start it the tty2oled stays black and the game does not start. It even sometimes hangs up the Mister completely and i have to manually restart it or turn it off completely.

Every setup is different and with things like video playback unfortunately it's a bit of a hack to get it working, so your mileage may vary. I have two testing setups, one connected to a CRT and the other to a small HDMI screen. It's working well on both setups but that's all the testing I can do before pushing updates.

i really like your script and really would like to use it but the inconsistensy is a deal breaker for me. maybe when i have more time to figure out what i am doing wrong i will give it a shot again.

[muggsy]

Oh yeah that should be no problem with local playback working again correctly. It just wouldn't play those games that correspond to the commercials. For that I would need to put these commercials into a XML. Feel free to contribute some commercials missing from the library!

Ive only just started looking into this. Updating SAM, setting keep videos and setting local allows me to play my video files which is awesome.

Im working through the various commericals i have, converting to the required format and once ive done that ill look into the xml code required to alow them to play in the manner SAM is intended for.. awesome work!

[mrchrister]

Sounds great. For batch conversion I created a tool you can find in the tools folder of the same GitHub. One for CRT and one for HDMI:
https://github.com/mrchrisster/MiSTer_S ... as/xvid.sh