For whatever reason, ELAN isn’t showing me any video when I try to play an .avi in an .eaf. All I get is a blank screen.
I am running ELAN version 4.8.0 on Mac version 10.8.5
Outside of ELAN my media player can play .avi files with no problems.
I tried loading some saved files that use .avi media to no avail (even though they worked on my Windows machine and even my lab’s other Mac). The tiers, annotations, and proper timing shows up–I just cannot see any of the video.
Next I created new files on the problem computer itself. I had the same result: a black screen.
A black screen has happened to me before and often I have just pressed ‘play’ and the video would work again. That phenomenon was not and has not been observed on this particular computer.
So I sort of fixed my problem, but I encountered another.
I installed Flip4Mac, a media viewing program that, when run with ELAN does actually let me see the video!
However, it is very difficult to navigate. Clicking and dragging on the timeline does not update the video display in real time (or is very laggy/“jumpy”).
The reason why the .avi videos worked on the other mac is because they had this Flip4Mac program installed. It makes me wonder if there is a better program out there or if this is the pinnacle performance…
So here’s another question, do any Mac users have issues navigating using .avi files in ELAN?
Not an answer to your last question, but here’s some background on media playback in ELAN. On Mac OS the framework ELAN builds on is QTKit, the basis of the old QuickTime Player (QT 7). The fact that a file can be played by e.g. VLC player doesn’t guarantee that it can be played by ELAN.
QT offers only very limited support for .avi files. A QT support page lists components / extensions that can be installed to add support for other media types and it mentions Flip4Mac as an option for .avi files. This does not mean that there won’t be better programs/extensions around, but this seems to be the preferred one somehow.
Indeed, maybe there are ELAN users who know good alternatives?
