FFmpeg has some serious problems in my retroarch

Ffmpeg apparently does not cache the video and make retroarch crashed after doing some brief skips, also apparently hard coded subtitles doesn’t work at all, this happens on AMD 23.3.1 driver version RX 6600

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You’re right, there is an issue with playing videos for me as well, and subtitles never work, unfortunately.

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ffmpeg has a lot of issues, enough to make it unusable for me.

  • Some videos stutter every few seconds. I don’t know why, it’s completely random. The various codec options don’t do anything.

  • Most videos will freeze/crash RetroArch if i use the core’s fast forward/rewind functions. I have disabled the buttons and use the built in RetroArch fast forward function, which is slower but doesn’t crash.

  • Even so, there are no other controls or features. Its completely barebones.

ffmpeg could have been a nice way to watch videos using shaders but with it’s alpha status state and bugs, it’s not worth the hassle. It also looks abandoned as i don’t see it get updated in the buildbot for a while now.

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yeah it crashes also after a time if you watch longer videos but this wasn´t allways the case so far i can remember that started a few months ago on my side i used to watched many stuff this way

i just was thinking i screwed it up somehow :sweat_smile:

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There it seems to be a minimal work on ffmpeg during the last months it seems to be for the core itself to do something on latest retroarch versions to my guessing

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I’ve been hoping for a bug fix update or maybe a different media player core in RetroArch since many years now, like when i first used RetroArch 7 or 8 years ago. The ffmpeg core is the same as it was back then, nothing changed. I guess there is no interest having a working media player in the platform. I really liked the idea of shaders in videos/movies but i’m no longer holding my breath.

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PRs welcome.

It’s not that nobody cares, but that it’s a lot harder to fit a media player into the libretro API than it seems. Several people have attempted it (see also the mpv-libretro core) and ffmpeg-libretro is still the best one, which should be indicative of how hard/complex it really is. Even though it seems like they’re doing similar tasks, media playback and libretro go about things in ways that conflict pretty fundamentally.

The ffmpeg-libretro core has also undergone several major overhauls since its original implementation, both to add additional features and to keep up with ffmpeg’s ever-changing/ever-breaking ABI, so it’s definitely not “the same as it was” 7-8 yrs ago.

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