Dear Han,<br><br>we have had a lot of problems with different Windows machines and ELAN + .mov-files.<br><br>QuickTime plays the .mov-files but in conjunction with ELAN there are problems.<br>The most recent one is the following:<br>On a Windows Machine XP Service Pack 2: Even with the older QT version (7.1.6), there is ongoing initialization with ELAN 3.3.0. With ELAN 2.6.3 we can open a file. Then, coding goes well for about a minute of video length (not 100 % smooth when watching frame-by-frame, but good enough). Then,the crosshair and the video start to play up. They react jerky, the video sometimes freezes for a while, ELAN buttons react very slowly. But the sound seems okay...<br><br>Also (this is no major problem but might help finding out what's going on), when the ELAN window is minimized and maximized again, the image of the video is gone (but again, not the sound). The seemingly only way to "fix" this is by opening the file anew. This also happens on another Windows machine that plays .mov-files in ELAN 3.3.0 without many problems (other than not playing perfectly smooth, especially at playing selections).<br><br>Please, let me know of any suggestions and missing information that you may still need...<br>Cheers,<br>Uta

There can be a number of issues at play here. There have been a number of changes in the QuickTime libraries with the last few updates that can prevent ELAN from successfully creating a QT based player.
In general QuickTime should be installed or updated first before installing ELAN, because the installer of ELAN tries to detect where QT is installed. It also tries to create a so called "access permission" policy file that is needed due to changes in QT's security model.
If QT is installed/updated to, say, version 7.2 or greater and next ELAN is installed, I expect things to work.

If a movie is displayed but playback is jerky and/or inaccurate, there is not much ELAN can do, I'm afraid. There may be error messages in the log file (<user_home>\.elan_data\elan0.log or elan1.log etc.) though, that could shine a light on the cause of the problem.

If the video is not visible after minimizing/maximizing it might help to change the video area size a bit (vertically drag the resize icon at the right of the ELAN window, at the same height as the play/pause buttons). This can force QT to redraw the video?

Han

Dear Han,

I had indeed installed ELAN and then QT... Now I have installed QT 7.4.1 first and then ELAN 3.3.0, it works.

It is still very "jerky" and after a while ELAN reacts very slowly and does strange things like going to the end of the file, annotater viewer flashing or going blank, etc. I will email you the whole log file but this is the part when it started to go wrong:

27.02.2008 10:05:57 mpi.eudico.server.corpora.clomimpl.dobes.EAF25Encoder save
INFO: G:\_phd\_MATHEPROJEKT\_ELAN\129UTA080227.eaf <----XML output

Clean up QT media player...
27.02.2008 10:09:51 mpi.eudico.client.annotator.integration.ExternalLauncher$LaunchThread run
INFO: Launch thread interrupted...
27.02.2008 10:09:51 mpi.eudico.client.annotator.integration.ExternalLauncher stop
INFO: External launch thread stopped...

Any ideas?

To your last suggestion: even though I could't resize the video, I had then the idea to detach and attach it, which worked.

Cheers,

Uta

Dear Uta,

Apart from the confirmation that indeed QT is used for playing the .mov file and that it is QT 7.4.1, there is nothing special in the log file. No error messages, only messages about saving the eaf file.
So, I'm not sure if there is anything we can do. I vaguely remember to have seen some messages on a QT for Java mailing list about similar problems with jerkiness. I could see if I can find that and if a solution is provided there.
If it is an option to convert the .mov files to mpg that would improve things much.

About resizing the video players area, see http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/manual/ch03s03s02.html.

Han