Hi, I’m trying to label the precise start and end of a behaviour in my videos. I have installed ELAN 6.5 in Windows 10 through the university but so far I have not been able to play my videos. First I was getting an error message and searching through the forum I found it does not like mov files, so I converted them to mp4. Now I don’t get an error and I can open a new project (File/New…) but the video area only shows a blue screen and does not play. Searching the forum further I found perhaps the way I converted the mov to mp4 was not ideal (I had used VLC), so I installed FFmpeg and converted the videos again through that. But my new mp4 videos are doing the same thing. I have looked at the log but I am afraid I don’t really understand it. The only warning messages i see are these:
WARNING: The aspect ratio is not initialized yet: 0.0
WARNING: No plug-in cmdi metadata file found in analyzer-gloss-0.6.jar
WARNING: No plug-in cmdi metadata file found in annotyzer-whitespace-split-0.9.jar
Apologies in advance if this has been covered previously, I really have tried to find a solution before posting here.
It’s not always clear why or when this happens.
What you could try, if you didn’t do so already, is to convert the file again using recommended settings from this media encoding guide.
If it still doesn’t work, you can go, in ELAN, to Edit->Preferences->Edit Preferences ->Platform/OS tab and select the JavaFX or VLC Player Library as preferred media framework. To see if it the video works with those media players.
Thank you, Han. Yes, I followed the guidelines for the conversion. I have now tried changing the Preferences as you indicated, but this hasn’t solved the issue. I understand from previous posts that this doesn’t only occur with Windows but also with Macs, is that correct? Could it be related to the ELAN version I have (6.5)?
Thanks again,
Marisa
Hi Marissa, I think this particular problem is specific for the default Windows player, but media files may fail on e.g. macOS for other reasons. Just to be sure: after changing the media player preference, any open window has to be re-opened in order for the change to take effect. At least the JavaFX player should play regular .mp4 files (and the VLC based player too if VLC is installed). If those frameworks are not able to play the file, there should at least be different error messages?
(You could try the .zip version of 6.7 to see if the same error occurs there? That version can just be unzipped and the ELAN.exe executed without any further changes to the system.)
