Volume setting not working for movie component

OS: Win10
PsychoPy version: 2023.2.3
Standard Standalone Installation? yes
Do you want it to also run online? no
What are you trying to achieve?:

  • I’m attempting to reduce the volume of a movie component but it is unresponsive to the Volume field. Even when Volume is set to 0, it plays at full volume.

Context/Settings:

  • The audio library is set to pbt
  • Audio latency priority set to 1
  • Force stereo is on
  • Video is an mp4
  • Experiment is being run locally
  • Volume controls are working fine in sound components of my experiment in other routines.

What did you try to make it work?:

  • I have adjusted the volume via the component settings in Builder.
  • I made an experiment with nothing other than a single movie component to see if it was a product of how it interacts with other routines
  • I have adjusted the audio latency priority settings.
  • I separated the audio file from the video and uploaded a movie with no audio along with a sound component containing the audio. The volume setting on the audio did not work, even when disabled.

Link to the most relevant existing thread you have found: I couldn’t find anything about a similar issue.

What specifically went wrong when you tried that?:
There are no error messages to report, these attempts have not altered the volume in any way.

UPDATE: I couldn’t figure out how to fix this problem in psychopy so I edited the volume of the movie itself (reduced to 2%) using MovieChamp. This was an effective work-around.

Thanks for catching this! What’s essentially happening here is that the volume is being reset when setMovie is called each repeat. @mdc has a fix for this which we’re hoping to get out with the next release:

In the meantime, if you add movie.volume = <desired volume> to the Begin Routine tab of a Code Component that’s below the MovieComponent in the Routine it should work as a quick fix as you’re essentially setting the volume back to where you want it after the movie is reloaded.