Videos freezing unpredictably during E-Prime 2.0 expts
David Vinson
I have a vaguely defined problem, just curious whether there's anyone
else on this list who has been running experiments with lots of video
clips - to see whether our own problems are typical or not & maybe
getting some suggestions for troubleshooting.
We're doing sign language experiments, displaying video clips one at a
time and collecting a keypress response for each. Video clips are .avi,
about 8MB each, and all work fine for display by E-Prime as far as we
can tell (eg by running a demo program that displays the videos one at a
time in sequence).
However when we are running the experiment, at a certain point the
experiment tends to freeze, requiring a hard reboot. This is usually
while the video is still on screen and a response has been made, in the
midst of writing the text file (info logged on a trial), because a line
in the text file is not written completely, eg
"...
DisplayVideo.ACC: 1
DisplayVideo.RT: 1719
DisplayVi" [end of text file]
Most of the crashes seem to occur about 1,000,000ms after starting, +/-
about 10000msec (If the experiment finishes in about 16min or less, it
seems to go fine... so far). Screen saver is disabled, power settings
are set to "presentation", anti-virus is not running, etc.
I know this is a problem that should be directed to E-Prime's online
support at http://support.pstnet.com/e%2Dprime/support/login.asp
but I completely dread the idea of waiting a week or two for their first
suggestion on such an ill-defined problem.
Any suggestions of any kind would be most welcome - my usual
troubleshooting approach of re-creating the problem in a very simple
test experiment doesn't seem to work here: small scale experiments run
perfectly fine.
Thanks!
dv
--
David Vinson, Ph.D.
Senior Postdoctoral Researcher
Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department
University College London
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5311 (UCL internal ext. 25311)
Michiel Spape
Just the usual when working with video files: .AVI (audio-video interlace) is not a format; many different formats using a plenitude of different codecs can be called avi (e.g. divx, xvid, etc). The problem is likely either with the files themselves - and if you want, you could re-encode them to a codec that will work better on your PC, using, for example, windows movie maker or some such - or with the codecs that are installed on your PC. This problem is often (and presumably also for the PST helpdesk) difficult to grasp since different installed codecs may sometimes be able to 'understand' the format, yet conflict with one another. I'd suggest cleaning your pc from any codec pack (should such be installed), then try some tried and tested codec pack (e.g. k-lite basic), or install merely the codec required by your video files (I know there are ways of extracting that information, I forgot how, but there's A LOT of pro and amateur video community on the internet). Should that fail, you might have to go through the laborious job of re-encoding all your video.
Your problem, however, sounds more like a hardware problem of some sort; does it also occur on different pc's that have different vga-cards and different codecs installed?
Hope that helps.
Best,
Mich
Michiel Spapé
Research Fellow
Perception & Action group
University of Nottingham
School of Psychology
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