[open] the best combination of vlc-plug-in + opensesame+ vlc player

antiqua

Hi,

I am trying to build an audiovisual experiment where the subject watches a video and selects an answer from a multiple-choice question per trial. Each movie is in .avi format, about 1 second long, and less than 1 mb in size. There are 240 trials in total. Although the movies seem less likely to cause any memory issue, I am still experiencing some random (hard)crash problem, in which the script freezes after playing a couple of trials. I have done some googling here and found that this sort of unreliable playback issue is very hard to resolve. Still, I would like to ask for any suggestion or help regarding what might be helpful.

Is there a best combination of the versions that works most reliably during video playback? I have been using the most recent opensesame (2.8.2), and vlc player (2.1.3). VLC-plug-in came with the opensesame, so I did not install it separately.

Best,
Shinae

Daniel

Hi Shinae,

You may try to download the latest version of the plugin from https://github.com/dschreij/media_player_vlc and see if it helps. You might also try to replace the vlc.py included with OpenSesame with the one from http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc/bindings/python.git;a=tree;f=generated;b=HEAD. I have to say though, that I experience a lot of issues with the vlc player itself lately, in that it doesn't seem to close down movies properly (vlc.exe keeps being active in memory after being closed) and stumbles over this when a new movie is loaded. It might be that the problems you experience are inherent to the current version of vlc.

The problem with these kind of errors is that they are very difficult to reproduce and consequently to solve as behavior of the vlc plugin differs per system. Furthermore, the vlc python bindings are quite badly maintained/documented and therefore difficult to work with. Shortly said, I don't know if I will be able to solve these errors at all. For these reasons I mainly focus on the development of the gstreamer based media player, which uses a much more open platform and is way more versatile (https://github.com/dschreij/media_player_gst). You might want to give that one a try and see if it works better for you?