Error 11093: "Unable to buffer movie"

[Rachel Aaron]

Hi there,

I'm working on a program that displays clips from 14 different videos, followed by a series of questions.  The videos range from 8s - 4 minutes 7 seconds, in sizes 298 KB - 43786 KB.  The videos are all located within one List Object.  When I run the experiment, I always get Error 11093: "Unable to buffer movie."  The odd thing is that every time I run the experiment, the error occurs at a different time (after 5 movies, after 8 movies, etc.), even when they order is the same.  I've ensured that all clips play by switching the order of the video in the List Object.  I can't figure out a consistent reason why this error is occurring, the length, number, and size of videos that play is different every time. 

I've gone back and forth with eprime support many times trying to figure this error out, but haven't solved anything yet?  Any thoughts from the eprime community?

Many thanks,
Rachel

[David McFarlane]

Hmm, putting "e-prime error 11093" into Google reveals that this very
question was asked here on 12 Feb 2014,
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/e-prime/kPm3uvuiraI , and got no
replies then. Not very hopeful, I'm afraid.

We had similar problems last year with a very simple movie-playing
program, never did figure it out. We finally switched that
experiment to PsychoPy, and still had problems with the codecs
there. Once we straightened out codecs it all worked in PsychoPy,
and for all I know if we were to go back to E-Prime those movie files
would now work there. So when I see these problems, I always think codecs.

Just my US$.02,
-- David McFarlane

[David Vinson]

Hi Rachel,

We've had some similar issues over the years using video: unpredictable but frequent buffer errors or crashes.
Although we never exactly identified the cause (quite possibly: related to HD access times), we managed to practically eliminate the occurrence by always preloading video clips before they need to be displayed (ie first event of a trial Procedure), and wherever possible, building in a bit of extra time between one video clip and the next.   

We also found this problem was hardware dependent, some PCs being really bad and others, not so bad. And finally, it might possibly be reduced by loading videos from a second internal HD that was not being used for caching etc.  (although this may just have been superstitious conclusions on our part).

Once we had something that looked like it might be working, we set up a stress test: auto-running experiment that displayed our videos up to ~1000 times each, with the same timing we planned to use in our experiment (logging data). This way we could let it go on its own, and in the event of buffer/crash problems, inspect the data .txt file to see how many trials it went before running into problems.  Successful autoruns on this scale gave us a lot more confidence that we could trust our experiments to real participants.

Preloading videos: can be done like the ImageDisplay example at the bottom of this page:
http://imaging.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/imaging/EprimeTiming

Finally, we did get some good advice from PST Support about video codecs (after a long dead-end trying various codec-based solutions, we eventually cleared them all out and went back to a fresh install of E-Prime).

Good luck,
David V

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[Rachel Aaron]

Hi Davids,

Thank you both for the valuable feedback.  Since it seems the nature of this problem is unclear, and because of impending deadlines (i.e., dissertation research!) I decided to divide the experiment into four parts.  It's not the most elegant experiment, but when I divide it up, I don't get the errors.  I'm going to see if I can batch them all together so they run seamlessly, and hope that that solves the problem for good.

Thanks again!
Rachel

[Renato Ferreira Leitão Azevedo]

Dear David,

Good evening!

Can you explain to me how to preload all videos that I am using? 

I am not sure I understood what to change on your image example. I am having similar issues with ePrime, and I would like to pre-buffer all videos if possible.

Thanks,

Renato

[David McFarlane]

Renato,

Might as well update my post here from 29 Aug 2014. As I reported in a
thread at https://groups.google.com/d/topic/e-prime/wJfU3r1OI7c on 24
Mar 2016, we did eventually go back and got those files to work in
E-Prime, using ffmpeg to transcode our .avi files to more .avi files.
That seemed to fix the codec problem and possibly some hidden file
corruption problem for us.

Hmm, I never thought about pre-buffering movies, and I thought that
EP2.0.10 did that by default anyway, maybe I should have looked into that.

Good luck, and let us know how this goes,
---------------
David McFarlane
E-Prime training online:
http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster)

[Fransisca Ting]

Did anyone figure this out?

[David McFarlane]

Codecs.