Memory issues related to MovieStim

Coding
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1

Hi,

Our group is currently running an experiment where participants are presented many videos. A different video is shown in each trial, and each trial specifies a string that specifies what video file to use. Each video is just 500 KB (10 seconds), but over the course of the study, we show participants over three hundred of them.

For some participants, this seems to create memory issues, where during the middle of the experiment, their browser will just crash and tell the participant that there was a memory issue.

Does anybody have some advice for how to overcome this? We have tried creating a new MovieStim object for each trial (with the specified string), and we have also tried resetting and modifying the previous MovieStim using .setMovie(path). Neither seems to work. We are doing .stop() at the end of each trial.

Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to be an issue for all participants, and I think around 70% are able to make it through the experiment without crashing.

Does anybody have some advice?

Thanks

2

@pbog - Were you able to resolve this problem? We are facing a similar issue. We are presenting 21 videos of 1-second duration using VlcMovieStim (1 trial), and expect this to run continuously for 10 trials. However, many times psychopy just crashes. On looking through the task manager, we figured out that memory usage jumps up while displaying the videos.

System specifics -
Windows 10
RAM - 16GB
Psychopy version - 2022.2.3