E-Prime 2.0 Professional Crashes after 4 Slides with Videos

[QVCL Lab]

Hello,

I am using E-Prime 2.0 Professional to create an experiment that contains slides with images and videos, but E-Prime seems to have problem running it. There are 18 slides in total, and each page has an image and a short video, but when I run the experiment the program always crashes at the 5th slide, presenting either "error -999 unable to buffer movie" or "error 1234 unable to stop sound". 
I am certain it's not the videos' problem, because when I put videos from later slides into the first 4 slides the program works fine until it reaches the 5th slide; and if I put a video from the first 4 slide into the 5th slide it still crashes there. The videos are all in .mpg format.
I tried making a new experiment from scratch and still got the same problem. So I was wondering if it's the program's problem? I use E-Prime 2.0.8.90 on Windows 7 Professional 32-bit.

Thank you so much!

Queen's Visual Cognition Lab

[David McFarlane]

Movies are a complete pain in the ***, no matter what high-performance
platform you use (we keep having movie problems with both E-Prime &
PsychoPy)!

And I would not be so sure that it's not the videos. We had a somewhat
similar vexing problem here. In our case we wanted to play a List of 13
short (~60 sec) movies, but the program frequently quit with "unable to
buffer movie" at the start of about the 10th movie (but unlike you, not
the same trial every time). The order of the movies did not matter. In
troubleshooting I even set the Movie objects to a Duration of 0, and
still got the problem! And this happened on two machines, so it wasn't
just the machine. And these were all .mpg files using MPEG1 video and
MP2 audio, about as plain vanilla as you can get, so we should not have
had a codec problem.

But when I inspected our files with ffprobe or GSpot, I noticed some
anomalies. Then in a move of desperation, I used ffmpeg to transcode an
earlier set of .avi files from .avi to .avi. Huh? Well, the earlier
set of .avi files used the "tscc2" codec (Camtasia), and running them
through ffmpeg replaced that with the mpeg4 codec (and made files that
made more sense with ffprobe & GSpot). And guess what? After that
wacky maneuver, the transcoded files played with no more problem!!

After that experience, I think that E-Prime (and PsychoPy for that
matter) work exactly as they should, and the problem was a corruption in
our movie files. Note that EP & PsychoPy are high-performance platforms
that put higher demands on movie playback, so it should be no surprise
that they are fussier about movie files than ordinary. Yes, it would
be nice if EP (or PsychoPy) would give a more informative error message
indicating that, but that's not really EP's job. From now on when anyone
has trouble with movies, I start from the standpoint that EP (&
PsychoPy) work exactly as they should, and I would look first at the
stimulus materials, and second at the installed codecs.

Anybody else have another perspective?

---------------
David McFarlane
E-Prime training online:
http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster)

[Vinson, David]

I have had very much the same experience as David M, although we typically use 100+ videos of 3-5 sec each. Fortunately, not played in immediate succession. When we have such problems our first step now is to go straight back to the original (uncompressed) video files and re-encode.

After playing around with a lot of codecs and then finding new problems with old experiments that worked fine on the same pc before, we have also removed excess codec packages and reinstalled E-Prime (same version).

mp4 is also our default preference, but on a couple of occasions we have found that sometimes performance is still poor (possibly related to differences between cameras) and a different codec works better.

Good luck,
DV

Sent by phone

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[Vinson, David]

Correction: I wrote mp4 but meant mpeg4.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/e-prime/BB07CBB4-FE51-4B95-9693-17A23E93E19D%40ucl.ac.uk.