[open] Video plugin mute option does not seem to work

Baldrick

Hello,

I was trying to control the mute option with a variable (in open sesame 2.8 vlc plugin), by replacing the line
playaudio set "no" with playaudio set "[variable_name]".
However this does not seem to work.

I then manually changed the option to "no" and I was surprised to see that the audio is not muted.

Next step was an attempt to edit the plugin python file (media_player_vlc.py):
I replaced the line if self.playaudio == u"no":
with a check on a variable that would be set in my main experiment loop (e.g: if self.experiment.play_audio ==u"no")
That also does not seem to work

One more thing that I am trying is to mute the system's audio with an external script that is control by inline code...

Am I missing something? Maybe it is a vlc version problem?
Any ideas for a workaround ?

Thanks!

Daniel

Hi Baldrick,

I've looked into this and noticed that the mute option is indeed broken. The problem however appears to originate from the python bindings for vlc and not in the plugin code. These bindings are really old (the last update was July last year) so I assume they just don't work correctly anymore with current versions of vlc. I've tried re-implementing the mute option by using the players audio_set_volume() function, but this simply returns -1 (which indicates an error occured and that the supplied volume value could not be set) to whatever value I pass to it. Moreover, audio_get_volume() also returns -1, even before I have changed anything to the volume, so I guess the audio functionality is just horribly broken in the bindings at the moment.

You could try the gst variant of the media player, that one is better maintained and should work with what you describe above: https://github.com/dschreij/media_player_gst/releases