[BUG] Background Videos are not scaled properly.

[u-man]

Hello GameEx Staff ,

The following video will show you the bug. Please pay attention to the corners and the big update title in the marquee.
 

 

 

I am sorry for the big video, but it is needed to better visually see the bug.
So what is happening here:

We are in the MAME-Categories-submenu. A video was picked (via Theme-editor and the video-option menu) as background for the MAME-Categories-submenu shown here. The picked video contains all theme elements (arcade cab, menue, bars etc. BUT on a black background). If you now choose a category, then a video is shown that is related to this genre. This video uses image-field 1 from the theme editor and is set to full screen resolution. This video also contains all theme elements, but this time it has a genre related background included. So if you scroll through the list, the entire screen will change and adapt to the choosen genre.

So far so good, but if you switch from one genre to another, then there is a time gap, that is filled with the video that we have chosen as the background for the MAME-Categories-submenu and here you will see that this background-video is slightly overscaled, probably just by only 1%, but it is noticeable. It is bigger then the image-field 1 video, which should not be the case. This is also bad for the image-quality of the video, as it is not shown in its native resolution. This results in a slightly blurred video, losing its sharpness and including artefacts. You can notice the degrading in carefully observing the area around the joysticks in the video.

Summarize: There is something wrong in the theme-editor video-option menu and it has to do with scaling. Any video you choose here, will be displayed as a full size background, slightly overscaled and not in his native resolution. Any video that you set for the image-field in the theme editor, is properly displayed. If you set the image-field 1 properties to the native resolution of the video, then it is shown as this.

Any questions? Feel free to ask .

GameEx ini and log files attached.

log.txt GameEx.ini

[Draco1962]

Hey there - @Tom Speirs may need to see a copy of your theme in order to adequately attempt to replicate this issue. Will have to wait to see what he says as he may know what is going on. I haven't a clue.

[u-man]

Yeah, lets wait and see what Tom will say. I think he will understand the video and if not, i will share the theme, no problem.

The bug is not related to my theme. You can repeat the same with any theme, you just need to setup one videofile that is used as background and has the same size/resolution as your theme and use the same video in image-field 1, which is also setup the same size (x=0, y=0, width and height= theme resolution). So basically you have 2 video-layers. Image-field 1 has higher priority and overlays the background, but whenever Image-field 1 is "filled" with a new video and GameEx needs to load the new video, you will see the background video until the new video is loaded, which then overlays the background again.

So in the above posted video, whenever you read "update" in the marquee (but without the update icon), you are actually witnessing the background video for the MAME genre menue. Anything else shown in the marquee, are Image-field 1 videos that are loaded. Depending where you are scrolling in the list, a different video is loaded into Image-field 1. In my example, this are fullsized videos for "update game list" and "MAME all games". Thats why i have switched between the two categories all the time.

I hope its easier to understand now.

[Draco1962]

Are rhe videos being used all the same pixel size and/or aspect ratio as the field they are expected to fill?

[u-man]

Yes, i did setup the image field properly. All videos use the same size (1440x1080 4:3 aspect) and GameEx is running at this resolution (see video).

Mind you, that the error/bug comes from the background video, where i have no options at all, except telling GameEx, use this video as background for the choosen section. It is the background video, that is oversized and has then bad quality. If i use the same video for the image-field, it looks better and is properly scaled.