Problems playing Videos

Vasileia_chr

Hello to everyone!

Lately I've been programming an experiment in Open Sesame, in which I want the participants to be presented with 32 videos in random order and respons accordingly to the instructions. Intead of putting 32 items I thought that it would be better to create a row inside my loop called [faces] and give the names of the video files in there. Later I just put one video player item i my thread and in "Video file" section I write : [faces].avi , this way I was hoping that evrytime the [face]. will take the name of one of the 32 videos I have in the pool and the correct video would be played, but apparently it doesn't. Instead of that a black screen is shown in every trial and I cannot figure out why. If you know why this is happening or you can figure out any other way to make it work, please leave a comment down below :DD

Thank you in advance!

Vasileia Christou

eduard

HI Vasileia,

The general idea of [faces].avi should work. So something is probably not quite right. Could you provide more information on how you do set up video playback? Which plugin? Is there an error message? Does it work if you directly code the video files (e.g. faces.avi )? Feel free to post your experiment here.

If you provide more information on the situation and the problem, the chances are higher that we can help you.

Eduard

Fab

Hi @Vasileia_chr,

I understand your task is running without generating an error but that the video simply doesn't show (it is playing but remains black on the screen). is that right?

I'm not sure what causes this, but I believe it may have to do with the back-end you're using.

I put together a simple task showing videos (in avi and in mp4) using [video].avi or [video].mp4 as video file information and got the black screen whenever I use a PsychoPy back-end. When using legacy or xpyriment, the videos play fine.

So, try one of these. Be aware that if your task includes Python code calling upon PsychoPy objects directly, you should use psycho as your back-end, though. Hopefully you're not using such code and your task will run fine with "legacy" or "xpyriment".

Give it a go...

Why the PsychoPy back-end generates problems, I have no idea why at the moment (maybe @eduard does?). but hopefully switching to another back-end will solve the problem in your case without affecting anything else in your experiment.

Good luck!

Fabrice.