I started using Retroarch as a video player, mainly for videos in 4:3 or similar aspect ratios, adding a nice shader and overlay I can feel I’m watching in 90’s and before.
I’d like to see a simple play/pause/stop function as well. Something that would also be nice would be a resume function, for videos we stop watching and want to continue were we stopped later.
I posted this request in the ffmpeg core libretro as well, not sure what would be the best place to request this.
Throwing this out there, haven’t used it (just heard about it), but if we are adding simple functions, FF and RR are essential as well.
Most of that’s probably not possible to implement, unfortunately. FF works just like any other core; that is, hit spacebar and the core will run as fast as it can (or as fast as you set it to allow in settings > frame throttle). Rewind and resume would require savestates to be implemented, which might be possible but we’d have to look into it. Pausing and stopping are handled by entering the menu and using ‘close content’, respectively.
Yeah I’ve been using F1 to pause/resume. A save state would solve the continue feature. I’m using Retroarch under Kodi to play 90’s stuff and below, if I watch in the main Kodi player and it saves where I stopped watching something, and try loading it via Retroarch the video starts from the beginning, do you think is there a way that Retroarch receives instructions like that, I mean, when it stops when where to continue from from Kodi?
It might be possible, but I don’t think any of the main contributors use Kodi, so it’s probably not something anyone would care to tackle.
I was expecting to build a Lakka box in a raspberry pi for my children with some old games that they might like to play and some classic disney videos aswell… Reading this looks like they will not manage to pause the videos with the controller, is this correct? 
I forgot to check what hot keys we had available and we actually already have a pause/play hot key, which is “p”, I changed “p” to “space” as I’m using it as a separate retroarch setup exclusively for video play, and usually space pauses in every video player I know. Better than pressing F1 to enter Menu. I miss a seekbar and a resume feature, apart of that, it’s perfect, best video player yet, there’s almost no low quality video that can’t be turned into a watchable video with a nice crt shader.