PsychoPy version 2026.1.1:
Standard Standalone Installation? Y
Do you want it to also run online? N
What are you trying to achieve?:
I’m trying to get high resolution video (2K or 4K) stimuli to play through PsychoPy, ideally with 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound. This is part of a cinema set up, where we have PsychoPy running through a projector with a surround sound system.
What did you try to make it work?:
So far, I’ve tried running the stimuli using ffpyplayer, but we get some dropped frames, or have to downscale the video so that it no longer looks good at scale on the screen. When I try using vlc backend I get this error:
movie = visual.VlcMovieStim(
AttributeError: module ‘psychopy.visual’ has no attribute ‘VlcMovieStim’. Did you mean: ‘MovieStim’?
Regarding the surround sound, whenever I transcode the video to have multichannel audio I get this error:
RuntimeError: FFPyPlayer failed to extract metadata from the movie. Check the movie file and decoder options.
I understand that ffpyplayer is based off ffmpeg, which can handle high res video and multichannel audio - so I think it’s possible to optimise! The computer is a very spec Mac Studio.
I’ve tried spliting the video and audio components, this doesn’t work, and I’ve also tried preloading the stimuli, but this still causes dropped frames (arguably looked worse!).
Has anyone done anything similar? Any reccomendations to try? It’s odd, in this version of psychopy, only ffpyplayer seems to work as the backend - this should be fine, but wondering if vlc might be better.