Video or audio playback issues
Some users have experienced issues playing video or audio files in BITTSy - either failing to play, or with problems like stuttering, stalling, freezing, or missing audio channels. Here are steps to take to resolve these issues.
Check our recommendations for visual and audio stimuli See this page.
Ensure your files are compatible with Windows 10 and playable with existing codecs Particularly if your stimuli were made on a Mac or originally used for studies on a Mac, your stimuli may be working poorly with BITTSy simply because they work poorly with Windows. Test this by opening your files in a Windows-native default application such as Windows Media Player and checking whether they play correctly. If they don't, you'll either need to convert to a new format or install a new codec to interpret the file.
Try re-converting your files Creating video/audio files in a compatible format for your computer requires using compatible options for... - video container format (e.g. MP4, WMV) - audio container format (e.g. WAV, AAC) - video codec (e.g. wmv1/wmv2, msmpeg4) - audio codec (e.g. adpcm_ima_wav). Container formats are what you are used to seeing - they're file extensions - and they're easy to directly specify in conversion programs, and see in your files by viewing their file properties. We recommend WMV and MP4 as video container formats, and MP3 and WAV as audio formats, although others may also work well. Container formats that are Mac-specific, such as AIFF for audio and MOV for video (Apple recently ended support of Quicktime for Windows, which used to help these play!) should always be avoided. Sometimes even with the recommended container formats, you can have a video that isn't compatible with your system and may experience playback issues, and this is generally due to incompatible codecs. However, unlike with container formats, it is often difficult to verify which video and audio codecs are being used (within conversion software) or were used (for an existing file). If you can create/convert your video files on the same computer that you use to run BITTSy, this is generally a good way to ensure you're always using codecs that are compatible and available on your system. We recommend FFmpeg as a free video conversion program that gives you a lot of control over the audio/video settings and encoding.
Try switching your video rendering settings Under the advanced settings menu within the main BITTSy user interface, you can select whether to use hardware rendering or software rendering for playing videos. One of these may result in better performance on your system. See this page for more information.
Try installing additional video codecs on your computer Finally, it's possible that your videos could play better with different codecs, or that there are some problems with the codecs that came preloaded on your computer. If you try downloading and installing a codec pack, be sure to ask tech support staff at your institution for guidance and recommendations - many links out there are actually malware! The K-Lite standard codec pack (downloaded from here) was helpful for some users.
Last updated