Things to add to Wiki

[brainyacademic]

Issues

Noted some small issues with use (easily fixed by users) that I think could be noted in the wiki to help users.

1. If you switch tabs within the same browser in which meye is running, the video continues to play as if it is processing, but data collection halts.

2. If you select "auto update" for either the graphical display or the data table:

   a) data output is significantly slower (on some sample files an average of less than 10 reads/s with "auto update selected" vs ~40-50 reads/s)

   b) with "auto update" for graphical display and/or data table selected, data output continually slows as processing progresses, resulting in more reads for earlier parts of the recording than later (for example in a ~5 minute video during the first 60s I was getting >10 reads/s, 250-310s in was ~6 reads/s, and the last 60s <5 reads/s) . Could pose downstream issues depending on analysis as data could be weighted towards earlier video segments. Output is much more stable when "auto update" is not selected

Suggestions

Mostly, I think it would be nice just to have this documented in the wiki so that users are aware. I especially did not notice the 2b issue until I had run all of my videos and started analyzing the output.

It may be advisable to disable the "auto update" (Issue 2) considering the fewer reads and decreased stability of output reads, but users should be aware of the issue.

Issue 1 is easily fixed by the user - you cannot switch between tabs in a single window but may open a new browser window (or bring other applications to the front). This allows meye to work in the background uninterrupted so long as it is the "active" tab in that window.

Additional context

I have been running meye on google chrome (Version 91.0.4472.77 and 90.0.4430.93) on an iMac (Catalina 10.15.7), have not tested other browsers to see if these are global or specific to chrome

[fabiocarrara]

Thanks @brainyacademic , you are right that these known issues should be stated more clearly as you suggested; we will update the wiki for sure, probably also change the default configuration of the tool.

About the FPS reduction when Auto-update is on, we introduced the Show only N last samples option that should stabilize the FPS over long videos. Enabling autoplotting still reduces the maximum reachable FPS, and if you aim for speed, you should disable autoplotting altogether, but showing only the last N samples should stabilize FPS throughout the analysis while keeping autoplotting. More info that should be added to the wiki probably :)
Have you tried also this option or found any issues with it? Maybe we could try enabling this option by default..

[brainyacademic]

Hey @fabiocarrara, as you suggested, show only N last samples does help with the FPS issue, with the caveat that the larger the N (like 1000) the longer it takes to reach and the FPS continually decreases until N is reached and then stabilizes - again, not so much an issue once you know about it because you can either set N low or just do without auto-updating the plot.

It does seem that when disabling the auto-update for the plot but leaving auto-update on for the table, the FPS decreases slightly over the course of the video as well, and there's no show only N last samples for the table to help stabilize the rate. Though, having the table auto-update isn't strictly necessary as all the data still exists once you export the csv.