XMALab lagging

[Jeffrey K Spear]

Hello,

I recently started using XMALab on a new (Windows) computer in our lab. Previously, I had been using it on my (Apple) laptop. Unfortunately XMALab is quite laggy on the new machine. It takes about half a second to move a single frame and when dragging the slider between frames it takes about a second and a half to reach the new one. On my laptop, frames load more or less as fast as I can click and the slider updates frames in real time. I tried it on another (also new) Windows machine in the lab and found the same thing, so it's not specific to one computer.

This surprised me because essentially everything about the new computers are better than my laptop--the new machines have better processors, better graphics cards, more RAM, and enough storage space to be able to load files directly from the hard drive rather than reading them from an external drive.

Is this expected behavior on a Windows computer (i.e., is XMALab better optimized for MacOS) or are there settings I should be able to change (e.g., might XMALab be restricted in how much RAM it can access)?

Thank you all so much for any help or advice.

Best,

Jeff

[XMALab]

Hi Jeff,

No, XMALab is not optimized for MacOS. It should work fine in Windows. The rate-limiting step is loading the images and that depends on the hard drive they are being loaded from. Maybe try your external drive on the Windows machine, if it is in a readable format for Win. 

What is your movie/image format? 

Are you analyzing X-ray video or standard video?

-- Beth Brainerd

[Jeffrey K Spear]

Hello Beth,

Thank you so much for the response. It makes sense that the limiting step is loading the images. The external hard drive is an HHD while the computer itself has an SSD, so the latter should be faster even without accounting for the time it takes to transfer data from the external. In the event, they are the same speed -- timing it, it takes 40 seconds to advance through 50 frames without any kind of tracking, etc. on the new lab computers, regardless of whether I'm reading from the external hard drive or internal solid state drive. It's only 6 seconds to advance 50 frames on my laptop, even though I'm pulling the videos from the external hard drive.

I am using exactly the same files on all computers. They are .avi files. Is there likely to be time spent 'converting' those files to single frames, and my laptop might be doing that better? Is it worth trying to convert the videos into image sequences?

They are X-ray videos.

Thanks again.

Best,

Jeff

[Rachel Olson]

In my experience - AVIs are way slower on PCs than Mac’s. No noticeable differences in image stacks. 

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On May 23, 2024, at 2:11 PM, Jeffrey K Spear <jks...@nyu.edu> wrote:



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[Beth Brainerd]

Hi Jeff — what we do is use lossless jpg compression and create a folder of jpg images. Lossless jpg compression works very well to reduce file size for monochrome videos.

Those jpg images then load a lot faster in XMALab.

— Beth

[Jeffrey K Spear]

Thank you so much for your advice. This has solved the problem!

For anyone encountering the same issue, I found that it was fairly straightforward to convert the .avi files to .jpg files using Fiji. I don't notice any difference in image quality in XMALab and the lag is gone.

Best,

Jeff