Video controls for instruction videos on Pavlovia

We are currently developing an online study that uses sign language stimuli and will also present participants instruction videos in signed language prior to the start of the actual experiment. Ideally, we’d want participants to able to use video controls for these instruction videos to pause, restart and navigate back and forth in these instruction videos. We understand that PsychoPy/Pavlovia does not normally offer this functionality for presenting video stimuli as this would interfere with the experimenter’s control over what is going on during the experiment. However, we were wondering if this would in principle be possible to enable somehow (at least on Pavlovia) to allow this kind of navigation and control for the participant for the videos that are giving the instructions as to how to perform the task?

Some googling has produced nothing which is why I wanted to ask the community and/or developers here directly whether enabling video controls along these lines is somehow possible, or whether we’ll have to think of implementing a workaround?

Many thanks in advance for your help!

Best,
Patrick

Hi Patrick,
i am working on a project which involves the “new” (online-ready) rating scale feature and movie stimuli at the moment.

I have used the last 10 minutes to produce a minimal example for a “play bar” using a few stimuli (play, pause symbol) and the rating scale to match your desired behavior.

Hope this helps you and maybe others! The smooth rating scale is awesome. Thanks to the PsychoPy-Team!

https://run.pavlovia.org/luke.boelling/movie_stim_controls/

Edit: It may be possible to animate the red button to match the movie timestamp…

2 Likes

Hi Luke,

I only had a brief look now at the example you posted but this seems to be very close to what we’re looking for, thank you so much!

Best,
Patrick

Hello Luke,

When I download your experiment to play on my PsychoPy app, the controls don’t work. Also, is there a way to speed up the video through the video controls? For example, if a participant wanted instead to stop or pause, to speed up/slow down the video?

Thanks! Also, anyone is open to answer this.

Sincerely,
Jasmine

Hi Jasmine,
the demo is only for online-experiments on Pavlovia, so if you test it offline you need to use the local (web) debug feature of PsychoPy.

For speeding up the video you could think of using different exports of the same video file ( normal speed, 2x, 4x) and change the it dynamically depending on a pressed button (“Normal Speed”, “Fast Speed”). You need to match the video position during the swap (from normal to 2x, the video position would be the half of the current one and vice versa)

Best, Luke