[open] OpenSesame 0.27.4 crashing with media_player_gstreamer

adamstone

Hi,

So I'm an OpenSesame newbie (but have used E-Prime in the past). I'm working on a study presenting video clips of sign language, and want to use media_player_gstreamer as that seems like the most modern one. I've installed the plugin and gstreamer both from github (making sure to also include the libav wrapper). When I try to add the media_player_gstreamer item to the experiment workflow, it hangs and then completely crashes.

Here's the error message Apple generates for me (it's long so linking to my Google Drive here): https://docs.google.com/a/gallaudet.edu/document/d/1N2r9VuUToHrUQXrMVucnA2mPlnfoLckPpQS-AyJ0_uA/edit?usp=sharing

Any advice will be welcome.

Thanks,
Adam

sebastiaan

Hi Adam,

Your Google Drive link is not public. Would you mind uploading it to a site such as pastebin?

Cheers,
Sebastiaan

adamstone

Whoops, sorry. And thanks for letting me know about pastebin. Here's the link: http://pastebin.com/GufDH5sf

sebastiaan

Hi Adam,

Ok, right. That type of error message indicates a hard crash somewhere deep down in the libraries used by OpenSesame. Very different from a Python stacktrace, which is generally quite easy to debug.

Support for Mac OS is still pretty hit-and-miss, and I'm afraid the chances of finding a fix for this crash are small. I'm not sure what the status is of video playback on Mac OS? ( @dschreij, any ideas?) Would it be possible to run the experiment under Windows or Linux, possibly using a virtual machine?

Cheers,
Sebastiaan

Daniel

Hey there. Sorry for the long wait.

I did some short tests on OSX and video playback appeared to be fine (still less good than on PC and Linux though). I've looked through the crash report and have no idea what caused this (the only useful info that I can extract is that some abort() function has been called).

My hunch is that this is a mix of architectures. What version of OpenSesame are you using and where did you get GStreamer from (homebrew, or a binary installer from their website? You can't get Gstreamer from github as far as I know). Try to make sure that everything you use (so both GStreamer and Opensesame) is either completely 32-bit or 64-bit. If you mix these up, you often get crashes like these.

That's all I can say for now. I will try to run more tests here soon and see if I can reproduce this. Maybe then I can find out more.