Windows Media Player problems

[jarvis24]

[edited from related support email]

Hi there, I am having a problem that is noted on the knowledge base but no
solution. I am attempting to run a "movie" .wmv file, and the first time I run it through Medialab a black box appears where the video should be. If I leave Medialab open and rerun the experiment file, the video plays as it should. If I close the Medialab program and reopen it, I get the black box again the first time through. I have "enhanced video" enabled, and if I uncheck it then nothing plays at all.

This problem is not occurring on my laptop with windows XP, only the ones in the lab. I am running Medialab 2008 on both, but the lab machines use Office 2007 and WMP 11. Have you figured out the source of this problem?

[edited from support email followup]

I found a workaround and would like to share it with you: Instead of treating it as a "movie file", we instead embedded the 180-second video on the background of an Instruction screen that we gave a parameter of (d180). It now plays just fine every time, and automatically moves forward after 180 seconds is up.

[amara]

I'm having the same problem. I'm trying to get Medialab to play some short .wmv files (tv ads). I've inserted them as movie items in questionnaires. But when I try to run the questionnaire, a black rectangle appears, turns to white, then Medialab just freezes - video doesn't present and I have to use windows task manager to get out of Medialab. I've checked and the videos do play in Windows Media Player with no problem. I tried the workaround mentioned above and it doesn't make any difference. I'm running Medialab 2006.2.40

Please help! Thanks.

[UCR McLab]

I'm having the same problem as mac was, only on one computer in our lab. The other three seem to work fine.

With Enhanced Video on, sometimes it plays fine, and sometimes it plays only the audio. With Enhanced Video off, it plays nothing at all.

The way our experiment is structured provides ample little test files- questionnaires with an instruction page, then the video- and it performs the same on each of these. It performs the same with every video I try, all 5 of our stimuli and WMV test videos. All of these are in WMV format.

We're running Vista, WMP11 and MediaLab 2008.1.33. Also, I find that if I hit ctrl-alt-del while the video is running, then cancel, the video displays where there once was a black screen.

Any help?

[Trevor Newell]

When using the enhanced video feature, does the video file play properly during the first launch of the software? For instance, if you launch the software, does the experiment run properly on its first run-through? Occasionally some users have found that the first run-through works; however subsequent cycles through the same experiment tend to cause the video functionality to randomly stop. It may be worth seeing if re-opening the software between each execution of the experiment helps solve the problem.

If not, it may be best to try re-encoding the videos as .AVI's . Some encoders just don't seem to work. As bizarre as it is, a good portion of the time .WMV files just won't work with MediaLab.

Getting the video files to run properly without the enhanced video functionality is better than having to resort to using the enhanced video option. Mostly due to the fact that the enhanced video feature tends to be a bit buggy. It has been left in the software as it occasionally seems to work properly for users every once and a while.

Our 2010 copy of MediaLab fixes all of our previous video display problems, unfortunately it would seem that you may need to try the above work-arounds before the video files will properly display and render as needed.

[Trevor Newell]

See also:
www.empirisoft.com/support/showthread.php?t=3442