Player Object - frozen video image

[okk]

Hi, I run into a strange issue with the player object. I am working on an interactive video-installation. On a card I have 100 buttons and one player object. If user clicks button 1, video 1 will be played from the Player Object. If user clicks button 2 video 2 will be played and so forth. In about 29 out of 30 attempts everything works fine, when the user clicks a button the respective video starts and plays smoothly. But in rare occasions the video freezes at the first frame and only the audio track is played. I cannot consistently reproduce the problem, it seems to happen at random, sometimes after 50 attempts, sometimes after 20. It can happen with any of the 100 video-files, so it is not file-specific. I use LC 7.1 on OSX 10.10.5 on the latest MacMini (2,6 GHz).

Any suggestion how to solve this issue? The installation will be shown in a big museum, so even if it happens once in 100 times it is not acceptable.

Best
Oliver

[Klaus]

Hi Oliver,

give the engine a little time to "breathe"
Do like this before playing a new video:
...
set the filename of player XYZ to empty
wait 5
set the filename of player XYT to "the new video..."
start player XYZ
...
Has helped me with similar problems in the past!


Best

Klaus

[okk]

Thanks Klaus. I followed your recommendation to let the player "breath" and it seems to have addressed the issue although the random nature of the problem has made it difficult to be certain. I noticed that the issue was more frequent when the video files were located on a slower disk.

Btw. is there any error message created when a video track is not playing properly? Or can the actual playback-rate in fps be recorded? Than I could write a test routine that repeatedly opens one of the 100 video-clips at random and logs any problems with playback.

Best
Oliver

[Klaus]

Hi okk,

Btw. is there any error message created when a video track is not playing properly? Or can the actual playback-rate in fps be recorded?

no and no, sorry.


Best

Klaus