video in compound stimuli

[antonella]

Hello,
I am trying to create a compound screen with a video and a word. I need the video to appear first and after a few seconds I want to display a word. Now, I have succesfully managed to do so with a 2-word combination, but not with the video + the word. When the word appear the video disappear.

Can anybody help?

Thanks

Antonella

[jarvis24]

I see the problem, the same thing happens here on my machine. Not sure what the deal is. I did find a possible way around it for now (while we figure out what's wrong). You can do compound screens involving video if the other stimuli are also video. Your other stimuli happen to be text but you could convert them to images. Images will play as video if you specify them as such. e.g., instead of "myword" you can use "_myword.gif"

Try the attached sample and see if it works for you. On my machine I get some occasional flicker of the initial video but at least it does not disappear. Despite the flicker I'm suggesting in case that's ok in your particular situation. Let me know how it goes.

[antonella]

[edited by moderator]
...
the solution does not work on the laptop where I have installed the software -- what you report as flickering is actually a 1-sec disappearence of the video. Now, I was wondering if this was due to the computer I am using or if you have any other explanation.
...
I can try to install the software on a different computer to see if the problem disappear.

Regards

Antonella

[antonella]

Hello,
I was still struggling on this problem when I realised that the file you sent in the zip folder is exactly the original I sent you, not the one including the solution you are talking about. Could you please send the new file (the solution appears to work better now, but I still have a few problems with a very blurred picture. I am sure you have used some specific setting to avoid the problem

Thanks

Antonella

[jarvis24]

Antonella,

I replied to this one last week, I'm not sure why it never showed up. I actually did make changes in that file--but they were to your stimulus folder rather than your input file. I changed the stimuli to gif images that were listed as movies, e.g.,

_dinosaur.gif (250x50)
_turtle.gif (250x50)
_mouse.gif (250x50)

That was because I found that DirectRT was more open to displaying other videos while another video was playing than it was to displaying images. Just so happens that DRT will allow you to present images as if they were videos using the standard video syntax.

[jarvis24]

I was able to replicate the delay you are talking about--quite annoying. Try this:
Go into the Windows Media Player (e.g., by double clicking on your movie file). Then go to:

Tools > Options > Performance > Advanced

And uncheck the option: called "Use Video Mixing Renderer"

By doing this, I was able to reduce the flicker to about 16ms on this particular test machine.


With regard to the blurriness, what is the native resolution of your laptop? Try matching that in the Options of the style file I included in the attached sample.