Position of Background Images/HTML

[Mary]

Blair,

First of all, many thanks for your assistance.

Okay, here's an update. Putting the DPI to large settings seems to have helped a great deal. When I used the external monitor to my laptop, I could get things to work okay.

Today I went into the lab and at first noticed some wonky kind of spacing issues, but I reset all of the lab computers to large DPI and it seemed to help. I had to adjust the spacing to deal with the monitors, but I think that's ultimately due to the fact that I'm working on wide-screen (pretty much) from home and from my office, and the monitors at school aren't that. That I understand.

Here's one issue that I continue to be confused about -- the placement of video. So if I specify a question as a video item (with no parameters), then the video appears in the upper left-hand corner (though not absolutely so). So it's at about 25% down and 15% from the left -- or therebouts. I thought it was supposed to be centered?

So here's my temporary work around. I convered my avi videos to flash and embedded them into a webpage. Then I used a webpage (with the % locations) to position in the video (with a webpage used as a background image). The flash video in the webpage is in the upper-left hand corner. This seemed to work both at in our lab and at home. So that would be the workaround that I would use.

Ultimately, the dodgy position associated with just using a movie file has led me to suspect (perhaps mistakenly so), that there's something up with the medialab-media player thing. Does media player mess with stuff? I don't know. I'm guessing at this point. But here's a potential hint. I noticed in the manual that when the height/width of a video is specified, then the video will appear at the upper-left hand margin. Well, I thought I was at full size, but I hadn't specified it. So to approximate it, I set it at h.99. At that point it was fully in the upper left position. So might medialab be resizing the image somehow? In other words, might media player video be centered, but the video it plays is not because it's not positioned right? This is my guess, but what do I know.

In case it's relevant, these are videos that I downloaded from youtube. I used dvdvideosoft to do it (freeware). I was going to try this, too, on a video that I created from converting from a VHS, but to be honest, I just ran out of time. This &*($ job is getting in my way of having fun with this program.

Thanks again for any insight you can provide.

Best,

mbo

[jarvis24]

If you open the video in the Windows Media Player, does it look and play as you would expect? If you click on the file properties while in WMP, what size does it say the video is? Does that seem to match what you are getting when it is displayed in WMP?

[Mary]

Hello,

Yes, the video looks exactly right in WMP. The file size is 320x240. It looks that size in media lab. I've tried embedding it as a background image, I've tried using it as a movie item, I've tried different types of video (e.g., wmv, avi). Nothing. Nothing. The only thing I can do is the work-around of coverting everthing to flash, embedding it in a webpage, then using the webpage as a background. This sure seems like a lot of work just to get the position right, so something is obviously not working here. At this point I'm beginning to run out of time on this experiment, so I have to use the work around unless I can get some alternative. Any thoughts? It sure would be nice to be able to use the program properly. I just cannot figure out what is going on. And this problem comes up on my machine at home, with or without the external monitor, it comes at on every lab computer at school, and it comes up at my office computer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Mary

[jarvis24]

If you like, I can log onto your system and see if I can tell what's up. Send me an email if you like--I could it today between now and 2pm.

[sas]

I'm having a similar problem. No matter what I do, the background image in a scale response item, does not move around the screen. I use, as the help file says, "1.bmp (t10)" for instance, or try different t and l values, even using %. The image always stays on the center of the screen.

This is happening on a Win XP with Medialab 2008 1.33.

[sas]

The problem was spontaneously solved. I don't know what is different from before.

[jarvis24]

Thanks for the update--please let us know if the problem recurrs.