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Forum Newbie
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 9/21/2007 9:23:38 AM
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Visits: 6
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Hello,
My name is Melissa Thomas and I work in Walt's lab. I tried running my paradigm on EPRIMEv2 and had problem with it. 1/4 of the way into the paradigm, EPRIME stops playing movie clips. The clips play just fine outside the software. I also tried substituting different clips in and EPRIME always stops playing them at the same place. Durations range from 2.5sec to 30 sec. Structure of paradigm is as follows:
Text slide
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
WHERE EPRIME STOPPED PLAYING CLIPS
movieclip
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movie clip
movie clip
movieclip
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
movieclip
text slide
Durations were set with event timing. The problem is is that initially .mpg files that we've created don't work for us. What happened is that we'd advance the first slide, but it takes a noticeable amount of time before the first slide disappears and then the experiment crashes. When creating the mpgs we used MPG2 codec. When we use the sample paradigm, it runs smoothly.
We did not have this problem when we tested AVI files. We quickly created an experiment that had a text slide and a movie slide with an AVI file. Everything ran smoothly, so we thought that AVI would work for us. But as I explained above, once we get past a certain point in the experiment, the videos are no longer displayed. The AVIs were created using an XVID codec.
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Forum MVP
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 1/5/2009 9:26:59 AM
Posts: 576,
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| Hi Melissa, Until later in the BETA cycle, what movie formats will play, require the best timing and performance will be a hot topic. There is currently a bug with playing at least uncompressed AVI files. AVI files can have a compression codec in them and that is currently undefined how they will play or not. You had mentioned that using the MPEG-2 files was causing a problem because of noticable delay between movie presentations. In later releases of E-Prime 2.0 (likely one of the releases after it becomes a public BETA) E-Prime will handle buffering of the movie files as intended. What type of machine class are you using to play these movie files? Although the minimum requirements will probably be a 1.5 GHZ ( no celeron), I would recommend at least 2GHZ or higher. I got the impression you said you did not notice the delays with the MovieRT movies. This may be due to either the size of the files overall or that they were encoded with the MPEG-1 encoding which does provide less quality than MPEG-2. If it is not much trouble, see what happens if you convert them to MPEG-1. You can do this with a number of utilities and here is one of them http://www.tmpg-inc.com/. Note that they provide a 30 day trial of MPEG-2 compression, but you'll want to do this with MPEG-1 compression. -Brandon
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Forum Newbie
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 6/30/2008 10:47:54 AM
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Hi Brandon,
I work with Melissa, and have run into this issue as well with a slightly different paradigm. My paradigm is structured as follows:
48 trials in which each trial consists of a 15s video clip played in a slide object followed by 7.5s cognitive task displayed using slide objects. My video clips are also in .avi format encoded with xvid.
I tested your suggestion to try re-encoding the clips with mpeg-1 using TMPGenc 2.5. I successfully ran the paradigm one time without the video turning to a blank (white) screen, but the second time I ran through it without restarting e-prime, the blank screen appeared after a few trials. This was tested in e-prime alpha 2.0.1.17.
maureen
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Forum MVP
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 1/5/2009 9:26:59 AM
Posts: 576,
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| Hi Maureen, Thanks for reporting this. I think the problem may be due to a resource leak in how the Slide loads its movies. I've been able to replicate something similar and fixed it. I had not been able to replicate this on my testing machines likely because they had more video memory available. In your scenario, you were running a couple of dozen movies prior to having the problem show up. I was able to run about 100 before I saw a problem (although not the same as what you saw, but resource leaks tend to have different problems related to them). I'll try to get a build ready soon and then get the link to you and Walt's lab this week. Please update me then on the status. -Brandon
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Forum Newbie
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 6/30/2008 10:47:54 AM
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Hi Brandon,
I just re-tested my paradigm and the problem seems to be fixed. I'm testing this on a new computer with a dual core 3.4 GHz processor, 2GB ram, and a 256MB ATI Radeon card. If I run into any other issues, I'll let you know. Thanks!!
maureen
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Junior Member
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 9/20/2007 11:00:34 AM
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I can display an MPEG-1 version of my clip, but not an MPEG-2 version. While my MPEG-1 file is selected, I see the first frame, and it seems to run fine. As soon as I select the MPEG-2 version for the "Filename" property of my MovieDisplay object, I get a message that says:
"Unable to load movie file. Select the properties button to configure"
Maybe I have to do something special to configure a codec?
In case it matters, I've used Ulead Videostudio 9 to make these MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 clips.
Thanks,
Shane
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Forum MVP
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 1/5/2009 9:26:59 AM
Posts: 576,
Visits: 1,254
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| To display an MPEG-2 video, a codec is required. Some useful links for codecs are included here: WinDVD - http://www.windvd.com
NVIDIA - http://www.nvidia.com
Elecard - http://www.elecard.com
DIVX - http://www.divx.com
FFDSHOW - http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiwiki/tiki-view_articles.php
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