MovieStim video formats

[Andrew]

Hi there,

I am in the process of making up some video stimuli for use with
PsychoPy, and I was wondering about video format support. Because I am
developing on a Mac, but running on either windows XP, or Linux, it
would be good to know what formats are safe to use. So:

1) Is there a list of supported video formats?
2) Is the list the same for all operating systems? and
3) What defines video support? Is it the underlying Python distro, or
is is defined by PsychoPy itself?

Thanks a lot!

Ta,
Andrew

[Jon Peirce]

movies are played entirely through pyglet, via avbin, which wraps ffmpeg. It would seem that any ffmpeg-supported format might work, which is a huge number:
http://ffmpeg.org/general.html
But obviously i haven't tested all these and I've actually had difficulty with certain file formats getting them to play the sound.

Pyglet's own documentation says:
"Load images, sound, music and video in almost any format. pyglet can optionally use AVbin to play back audio formats such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis and WMA, and video formats such as DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, WMV and Xvid"

basically, I'd like to hear how you get on and whether there's a file format you find to work well that we should be recommending to others

Jon

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[Andrew]

> movies are played entirely through pyglet, via avbin, which wraps ffmpeg. It would seem that any ffmpeg-supported format might work, which is a huge number:http://ffmpeg.org/general.html
> But obviously i haven't tested all these and I've actually had difficulty with certain file formats getting them to play the sound.
> Pyglet's own documentation says:
> "Load images, sound, music and video in almost any format. pyglet can optionally use AVbin to play back audio formats such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis and WMA, and video formats such as DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, WMV and Xvid"
> basically, I'd like to hear how you get on and whether there's a file format you find to work well that we should be recommending to others

Thanks for the answer. When I saw that ffmpeg was being used, it did
give me hope that whatever I wanted to use would work.

However, there does seem to be a bit of an issue playing H.264 files.
Specifically, when I try to play H.264 .mov files the play back is
really jerky, but if I export the same videos to mpeg-4 videos they
play fine. The only real difference is in the file size, with the .mov
files being about five times the size of the .mp4 videos, although
the .mov files are only about 2MB each.

Is there any known problems with file size?

Ta,
Andrew