Error 11093: "Unable to buffer movie"

[David Vinson]

Hi Rachel,

We've had some similar issues over the years using video: unpredictable 
but frequent buffer errors or crashes.
Although we never exactly identified the cause (quite possibly: related 
to HD access times), we managed to practically eliminate the occurrence 
by always preloading video clips before they need to be displayed (ie 
first event of a trial Procedure), and wherever possible, building in a 
bit of extra time between one video clip and the next.

We also found this problem was hardware dependent, some PCs being really 
bad and others, not so bad. And finally, it might possibly be reduced by 
loading videos from a second internal HD that was not being used for 
caching etc.  (although this may just have been superstitious 
conclusions on our part).

Once we had something that looked like it might be working, we set up a 
stress test: auto-running experiment that displayed our videos up to 
~1000 times each, with the same timing we planned to use in our 
experiment (logging data). This way we could let it go on its own, and 
in the event of buffer/crash problems, inspect the data .txt file to see 
how many trials it went before running into problems.  Successful 
autoruns on this scale gave us a lot more confidence that we could trust 
our experiments to real participants.

Preloading videos: can be done like the ImageDisplay example at the 
bottom of this page:
http://imaging.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/imaging/EprimeTiming

Finally, we did get some good advice from PST Support about video codecs 
(after a long dead-end trying various codec-based solutions, we 
eventually cleared them all out and went back to a fresh install of 
E-Prime).

Good luck,
David V

On 29/08/2014 15:04, Rachel Aaron wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm working on a program that displays clips from 14 different videos, 
> followed by a series of questions.  The videos range from 8s - 4 
> minutes 7 seconds, in sizes 298 KB - 43786 KB.  The videos are all 
> located within one List Object.  When I run the experiment, I always 
> get Error 11093: "Unable to buffer movie." The odd thing is that every 
> time I run the experiment, the error occurs at a different time (after 
> 5 movies, after 8 movies, etc.), even when they order is the same.  
> I've ensured that all clips play by switching the order of the video 
> in the List Object.  I can't figure out a consistent reason why this 
> error is occurring, the length, number, and size of videos that play 
> is different every time.
>
> I've gone back and forth with eprime support many times trying to 
> figure this error out, but haven't solved anything yet?  Any thoughts 
> from the eprime community?
>
> Many thanks,
> Rachel
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-- 
David Vinson, Ph.D.
ESRC Research Fellow
Experimental Psychology
University College London
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5311  (UCL internal ext. 25311)

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