I ran into this on my R36S running ArkOS 2.0 (11072025) and figured I’d document the fix.
Problem:
Videos appeared in the Movies menu (after being copied to the movies folder), but when launching one ArkOS showed the loading screen and then immediately returned to EmulationStation. I first assumed it was a codec/format issue, but even very basic MP4/AVI test files failed from the menu.
Cause:
The video launcher script existed, but it was missing the executable bit:
/usr/local/bin/mediaplayer.sh
It had permissions like:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root ... /usr/local/bin/mediaplayer.sh
EmulationStation tries to run it directly via the Movies config, so this causes a silent failure / return to menu.
- Fix with SSH access:
If you have SSH access run:
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/mediaplayer.sh
- How to run the fix without SSH:
- Download the script from the gist: https://gist.github.com/andrei930/09b46f24a363c33326e9eac46073357b
- Copy r36s_fix_mediaplayer_permissions.sh to your SD card, for example: /roms/movies/r36s_fix_mediaplayer_permissions.sh
- Put the SD card back in the R36S.
- Open the ArkOS File Manager.
- Navigate to:
​
/roms/movies/
- Select r36s_fix_mediaplayer_permissions.sh and execute it.
- It should create a log file named:
​
/roms/r36s_fix_mediaplayer_permissions.txt
- Reboot the R36S or restart EmulationStation.