EmuMovies "blank" video snaps: what to do?

[Koop]

I'm a subscriber to EmuMovies and I have downloaded the sets of video snaps (and regular snaps) for my MAME ROMs. EmuMovies is great, but they have provided me with a bunch of "blank" videos. What I mean by "blank" is not that they don't display anything, but they display a short message saying "a video does not exist" or "this is a mechanical ROM and cannot be played" (not exact verbiage). I'm wondering what everyone else does with these videos (and photos).

Currently, there are many of these "blank" videos (and snaps) in my ROM list when I select "All MAME ROMs". Therefore, when I am viewing the main GameEx menu it shows random videos and snaps which is often one of these silly/annoying "blank" videos. So I could approach this problem in 2 ways:

1) Filter my ROM list to get rid of the mechanical ROMs. I would like to do this anyway, but currently I'm having trouble accomplishing this without also removing the different versions of other ROMs (i.e. I want to have all versions of "X-men" available to choose from). But that is a different problem and I'm going to create a separate post for that. Still, this option would not get rid of the many videos and snaps that say "a video does not exist".

2) Manually delete these "blank" videos and snaps. I think I can do this easily. If I arrange the files my file size then all of the blank ones should group together and I can delete them easily. The problem with this is that I use the Downloader Utility from EmuGames. This utility (I believe) will detect missing files and re-download them. So, at some point in the future I'll have to manually delete them again. Still, I think this is my best option.

Does anyone know of a better option? Has someone figured out how to keep these videos from showing up in the main GameEx menu?

[Draco1962]

Only two ways to get rid of those videos - get rid of the ROM that it represents and/or create a video or snap image to replace the "a video does not exist" video. Generally, I leave them there as it is better than nothing in the space and a reminder that I need to, at some time, create my own and contribute back to the community.

[Koop]

Good point about creating your own and giving back. When you say there are only 2 ways, are you saying that manually deleting the file would not work for some reason?

One reason I would like to delete the "blank" video files is that I may have a valid regular snap instead. GameEx seems to only display the video snap if one is available, and hides the regular snap. So by deleting the video, I would then be able to browse using the regular snap (I think).

[Draco1962]

Correct. GameEx looks for videos first (.avi, .mp4. etc.) then looks for the presence of snaps. There are many more snaps for the various ROMs than videos. While the EmuMovies Download Utility is a great software for automating the acquisition of missing videos and snaps, I much prefer using the FTP for manually downloading what I need. This may be a preferable route for you as well as you can remove the "blank" video and provide the snap to show until a video is available or you have time to create your own. This will also help you manage, albeit manually, without the Download Utility replacing the missing video that you had just removed.

[T. Goodchild]

I've also noticed that a lot of the blank entries have "(MPU4)" after the game title. What does it mean and I can I filter these out specifically?

[Circo]

Are you talking about the game not working videos? sort by file size and remove from your hard drive those arent missing they are games that supposedly dont work, I remove them and audit every few versions and replace with game vids as they become playable. I am not sure what mp4u is, the extension of all the vids is mp4 is that what you mean.

[T. Goodchild]

When I have all the roms in Game Ex MAME set to unfiltered I get these specific cases. They must be the not working ones but they are included in the set anyway. This is a copy paste of several of the titles as they appear. They don't turn up when I filter them so it's not a big deal I was just curious.

[Circo]

I don't have one blank video in the set and all videos are named mame names ie: the dos rom name. That looks like a database error. Now I do have "Not Working" videos which I think is what we thought that you meant. They are all like 94 k and will be the smallest videos in the set.

[Koop]

Just to clarify, now that I've relooked at my files: The videos just show picture of a red triangle with an exclamation point on it and the words "This game is not playable" appear on that screen. They are 96KB in size for the high quality set and 29KB for the low quality set. In the photo snaps (not video) there are many snaps that simply say "Mechanical This set has no InGame snapshot".

Probably the best solution is to make it so that GameEx filters out ROMs that don't work or are "mechanical" ROMs (what does mechanical mean?). But, I'm still working on that part and I'll make a separate post for that kind of help when I'm ready. In the meantime, I think I am going to delete the video snaps that say "this game is not playable". I want to do this so they don't randomly get played on the main GameEx screen and so they don't randomly get played during the screensaver mode (my screensaver are the videos, not actually running MAME). Since I have videos, the mechanical ROM snaps don't show up on the main GameEx screen, and they don't get played in the screensaver. The only time I see them is when I'm browsing the game list. So I'm not worried about those right now. Those will go away when I solve the GameEx filter problem.

Thanks for the advice.