Testing of videos in 1.82

[ShoinExp]

Hi,
    Thanks for the new version! There are some cool new functions in this round (for me, particularly the Psi adaptive method).
    As I've done for the last few releases, I've tested the video component on a large (30+) set of different video encodings.  The good news is that the video component is hanging the computer a lot less.  The bad news is that there doesn't seem to be any improvement in choppiness.  This is being tested on a blazing fast Mac (with 16 GB RAM and solid-state hard-drive) so computer speed is not a likely explanation.
     I tested the videos on both avbin and opencv backend, and there was something interesting there:  avbin was the same as with the last release (as far as I can tell), but opencv had noticeably better playback in audio (no glitching or hanging).  However for ALL video encodings, if opencv played anything (rather than just crashing), the video was a solid black rectangle.  No video frames were displayed in any of the encodings, just black.
     Sorry to always be the bearer of bad news when it comes to video testing - I don't mean to be a drag, I just need to test the video component for my own use and figured a report (even a bad news one) would be the least I can do in return for the use of this very cool software.
     Thanks!
     Mark

[Sol Simpson]

Re the opencv based vide, can you run the psychopy/demos/coder/stimuli/MovieStim2TimingTest.py script and send the resulting .txt report (saved to the same folder as the demo script). The saved report will have a bunch of useful information about your computer hw and sw setup, and what happened timing wise frame by frame during playback. We can take it from there.

I've tested the latest psychopy source using this script on OSX 10.9.5 with three different video's and moviestim2 runs OK. I do need to use an Anaconda 64 bit python env for the playback to be smooth when using OSX, but I have not seen the black video issue you are getting on either python env when testing on my mac mini. So perhaps the blank video issue is related to the version of OSX being used, the graphics card on your system, or such.

Thanks very much,

Sol

[ShoinExp]

Hi,
    Thanks Sol.  Here is the file from my fast mac, and I also tested the new version on my old mac (much less fast).  The problem was the same on both and I've attached the files from both.
     Thanks,
     Mark

[Sol Simpson]

HI Mark,

Thanks for that. Both the systems are able to update a frame in 2 - 3 msec, so there is no issue there. Both the systems have NVIDIA cards it appears. The mac mini I have for testing with OS X uses an ATI video card; I am not sure what card / chipset the system Jon normally tests with has. Maybe one of the changes made to the movie2 stim is not compatible with the NVIDIA driver being used for OSX. 

Can you please try:

1) Edit the MovieStim2TimingTest.py script and search for the line with "mov.useTexSubImage2D = True". Change this to "mov.useTexSubImage2D = False", save, and rerun the script. Does that fix the black video for you?

2) This one involves editing the psychopy/visual/movie2.py source file that can be found in the Psychopy2.app bundle, so please make a backup of it first. Open the movie2.py source file and do a search for:

GL.GL_BGR

and replace all occurances of it in the file with:

GL.GL_RGB

Save the file, close PsychoPy2 if it is open, and restart it. Then run the MovieStim2TimingTest.py test again. Does this help? If it does, the red and blue color channels will be swapped, but atleast we know what the issue is. We can then add back the code that converts each image frame from BGR to RGB.

Let us know if either of these two things helps. If not, we'll have to look more closely at what changed in the movie2 stim between versions.

Thanks again,

Sol

[ShoinExp]

Hi,
    Thanks Sol!  I tried both changes individually, and then both together.  No change.  Here are the result files from each run.
    Thanks,
    Mark

[Sol Simpson]

Here is a version of the psychopy/visual/movie2.py source file which only has the changes made by Jon, nothing updated by me since the last release before 1.82.

Can you backup your existing   psychopy/visual/movie2.py source file and replace it with this one. The video test demo will still run. Please let me know if this works for you. If it does, we have narrowed down the issue to some remaining change I made to the movie2.py file since Jon did his commit about a month ago.

Thank you!,

Sol

[ShoinExp]

Hi Sol,
     Thanks - that solved the "black box" problem.
     Thanks!
     Mark

[Jonathan Peirce]

OK, sorry to have been absent on this. Busy few days.

Sol, this fix is already in the repository? I could build a 1.82.01 bug-fix release to include it now if we're good to go?

cheers,
Jon

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