How to get video snaps to display properly in Maximus Arcade

[MaseMan]

This is a basic outline of how I was able to get the .mp4 files from this site to display properly in Maximus Arcade's game selection menu (which does not have native .mp4 support). This is useful for people who may already have a lot of mp4 files on their PC and want to try Maximus Arcade, or haven't figured out/found out how to download movies in .avi format.

1) Download and extract your .mp4 files, put them in your MAME folder in a "Movies" folder (You may have to create this as a new folder). 

2) In Maximus Arcade's preference settings, make sure you have Maximus Arcade pointing to your "Movies" folder under MAME settings. Also, make sure you list ".avi" as a valid file extension under this section! Make sure you also check the box next to "Rescan media folder," so Maximus scans for your movie files the next time it starts up.

3) In Windows, go to File Explorer. Go to the folder where you've placed all the .mp4 files.

4) Hold down "Shift" and then right-click in this folder (without highlighting any files). Choose "Open command window here" in the context menu that should appear.

5) In the command prompt, type the following: "ren *.* *.avi"

(No quotation marks, and include the spaces as shown).

6) All the .mp4 files in your Movies folder should now be renamed with the .avi file extension!

7) Try to play the files in Windows using Media Player or another media program. If the files do not display properly in your version of Windows (such as only audio playing, but no video), download the codec found here: K-Lite Codec Pack: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/k_lite_codec_pack.htm You may have to restart your PC after downloading and installing this codec. If the .avi files play fine right away, you should be able to skip this step.

8) Start Maximus Arcade. It should scan your media while it loads. You should find now that the preview movies play in Maximus Arcade! This of course assumes that you have your roms named the same as the movie files. (eg. atetris.rom should match with atetris.avi).

Hope this helps, as I found many people haven't been able to figure this out from scanning forums online. Any questions?

[Mallex]

Thanks for this! I usually use Maximus on lower end computers with MAME but this was a constant problem that is now solved!

[MaseMan]

Thanks for this! I usually use Maximus on lower end computers with MAME but this was a constant problem that is now solved!

Glad it worked for you.

[corvette4evr]

Awesome info.  Was having to rebuild a Maximus PC, had hardware failure, and needed information to set it back up.  Thanks much!

[MaseMan]

On 5/3/2016 at 6:43 PM, corvette4evr said:

Awesome info.  Was having to rebuild a Maximus PC, had hardware failure, and needed information to set it back up.  Thanks much!

Great, glad it worked. Maximus Arcade is still a really great front end, IMHO.

[seanjohn23]

I tried this but the videos are not playing once I start Maximus Arcade. I tried re-scanning a few times and made sure the file names were matching and I added the avi extension to the media extensions under the scan tab.