Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to run a webexperiment where I'm running into problrms with the size of the video stimulus that I want to employ. We've tried everything to get the file size down, and although it's able to run, the time for the study to load is really prohibitive.

In thinking of possible work-arounds, one thing that occured to me was for us to load the videos in a player that we house on our own server, and then just put those into an htmlpage. I think this would definitely solve the problem in terms of file size and loading.

BUT, it's important that the participants don't just breeze through the video without watching it. In other words, I don't want them to be able to click forward or continue until the video is completed.

I *think* I can use htmlpages as instructions only, and if I'm right about this, I'm not so sure how to accomplish this goal.

If anyone has any suggestions, I would surely appreciate it!

Thanks in advance!

Mary

Not necessarily. The data *still* has to be transferred to the client computers. In your scenario, this will happen *while* the exp is running, not beforehand, which simply opens the door for different issues (e.g. network timeouts, slow client connections, etc.).

You think right.

https://www.millisecond.com/support/docs/v3/html/language/attributes/wait.htm

Regards,

~Dave

Thanks Dave.

I'm actually using the "include" command to put together various parts of the experiment. So there's an "instruct" part that pertains to everything. If I put a "wait" on the <instruct>, will it apply to all instructions throughout the study?

Right now I was including the htmlpage element as part of a preinstruction. Is it possible to put a wait on that as well? Just not seeing it yet.

Thanks!

Mary

<instruct>
/ wait = 0
</instruct>

<block b1>
/ preinstructions = (p1)
</block>

<block b2>
/ onblockbegin = [instruct.wait=5000]
/ preinstructions = (p2)
</block>

<page p1>
no wait
</page>

<page p2>
wait 5 secs
</page>

<expt>
/ blocks = [1=b1; 2=b2]
</expt>

Regards,

~Dave

Dave,

You are beautiful!!

Best,

Mary

Hey Dave, for my mac videos, we made them as small as possible without sacrificing quality too much. It's still taking my mac about 5 or 6 minutes to load though which is quite a lot. I'm pretty sure that as of now, the whole video loads, and once that's happened it starts to play. Is there any way to modify the script so that the video plays as it's loading (similar to how it works on youtube)?

Or, do you have any other suggestions on how to get around this 5-6 minute video loading time?

Thanks!

Libby

No, that's not currently possible. While such an option may become available at some point, it would have to be used with utter caution: Ever had a Youtube video stutter or freeze? As long as you are watching cute kittens for comic relief, that may not matter much. But if you are using a video for, say, mood induction in a behavioral experiment, you certainly don't want that to happen. And the only way to make sure is to fully download all stimuli (including video) prior to starting the experiment.

That said, we are aware of sometimes slow load times and you can expect things to improve somewhat in future releases.

For the time being, the only option to display streaming videos would be to host them yourself on some server and have Inquisit display the html page with the embedded video.