Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Debugging errors with playing movies in E Prime 2.0.10.etc

Ok, set up the experiment and test on my main dev machine.  Movies work fine.  using MOV files in this case.

Move the experiment and the movie files to laptop... failes miserably due to video codec.

Install quicktime... fails.
Install VLC... fails.
Install K-lite... plays.  (now using ffdshow)
The experiment runs like a dog. (No hardware acceleration)

Move to a new machine.... test the exp. Fails miserably due to video codec.

Install K-lite... fails.. but differently.
Install DirectX.... better but new failure. (Unable to load sound 203...)
Install VLC and Quicktime just to cover my bases... still fails but whinging about audio now. Tells me to check AudioLoadReport in Experiment folder. (They are actually in the same folder as the stimuli videos.. which is not the same as the experiment folder... but close enough. (BUG anyone at PST who cares))

The AudioLoadReport is complete garbage. It's XML, which I could deal with.. but it does not actually say anything useful.

Interestingly, of the 60 MOV files in the stimuli set, 13 have generated AudioLoadReport.xml and VideoLoadReport.xml files... but the rest have not.  This is common on all three computers.  I have had a look at all the video files in GSpot and MediaInfo and they use the same Codec's for both Audio and Video (Vanilla Mov file with MPEG4, AVC and PCM audio.)

Weirdly inconsistent.

I'm now trying to update everything on box 3 to see if it will magically come good.  I'm at a bit of a loss at the moment as to why it is having trouble.  Quicktime, VLC, Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player can all play the files correctly. There is some weird filter graph issue that shows up in an older copy of GSpot...so I think the issue is with my DirectX setup on that machine.

The investigation continues.

Ran CodecConfig.  Still no love.

Later...

I used GraphStudio from K-lite to have a look at the filter graph and found the audio pin was not rendering to anything from the Apple Media Splitter filter.  This seems to be due to the Mov files having PCM audio rather than AAC which is more usual in Mov files.  I  then tried using the Haali media splitter and hooking the audio pin to the DirectSound output filter... Success!  So all I had to do was then swap the prefered filter for Mov files from Gabest Splitter to Haali using the "Manage prefered DirectShow source Filters" tool in K-lite and the experiment played flawlessly.

Interestingly on my main dev machine the Gabest Splitter filter is not installed. It has the LAV Splitter as the primary splitter for Mov and it works perfectly.   Download LAV Splitter here



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